• Getting information out of a path
• Working with paths

Every file in the system has a path.

On Linux and macOS, a path might look like:

/users/flavio/file.txt

while Windows computers are different, and have a structure such as:

C:\users\flavio\file.txt

You need to pay attention when using paths in your applications, as this difference must be taken into account.

Include the module in your code with

const path = require('path')

and you can start using its methods.

Getting information out of a path

Given a path, you can extract information out of it using those methods:

• dirname: get the parent folder of a file
• basename: get the filename part
• extname: get the file extension

Example:

const notes = '/users/flavio/notes.txt'

path.dirname(notes) // /users/flavio
path.basename(notes) // notes.txt
path.extname(notes) // .txt

You can get the file name without the extension by specifying a second argument to basename:

path.basename(notes, path.extname(notes)) // notes

Working with paths

You can join two or more parts of a path by using path.join():

const name = 'flavio'
path.join('/', 'users', name, 'notes.txt') //'/users/flavio/notes.txt'

You can get the absolute path calculation of a relative path using path.resolve():

path.resolve('flavio.txt') //'/Users/flavio/flavio.txt' if run from my home folder

Node appends the path to the current working directory. If you pass a second argument, resolve uses the first as the base for the second:

path.resolve('tmp', 'flavio.txt') // '/Users/flavio/tmp/flavio.txt' if run from my home folder

If the first parameter starts with a slash, that means it’s an absolute path:

path.resolve('/etc', 'flavio.txt') // '/etc/flavio.txt'

path.normalize() is another useful function; it resolves the actual path when the string contains relative segments like . or .., or duplicate slashes:

path.normalize('/users/flavio/..//test.txt') // '/users/test.txt'

Neither resolve nor normalize checks whether the path exists. They only compute a path from the given segments.

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	How to check if a file exists in Node.js
2:	How to create an empty file in Node.js
3:	How to get the names of all the files in a folder in Node
4:	How to get the last updated date of a file using Node.js
5:	How to remove a file with Node.js
6:	How to write a JSON object to file in Node.js
7:	How to empty a folder in Node.js
8:	Working with file descriptors in Node
9:	▶︎ Node File Paths
10:	Node file stats
11:	Working with folders in Node
12:	How to use the Node.js fs module with async/await
13:	How to get the current folder in Node
14:	How to get the file extension in Node.js from the MIME type
15:	How to get the file extension in Node.js
16:	How to list files in a folder in Node
17:	How to mass rename files in Node.js
18:	Node.js get all files in a folder recursively
19:	Incrementing multiple folders numbers at once using Node.js
20:	Save some text to a file in Node.js