In this chapter, we covered the Boost Filesystem library for reading file metadata and state of files and directories, and performing operations on them. We also covered the high-level Boost IOStreams framework for performing type-safe I/O with rich semantics.

Working with files and performing I/O are basic system programming tasks that almost any useful piece of software needs to perform and the Boost libraries we covered in this chapter ease those tasks through a set of portable interfaces. In the next chapter, we will turn our attention to another systems programming topic—concurrency and multithreading.