Basic File Operations

Table of Contents
Basic File I/O — synchronous file operations similar to posix calls, but using uris
Directory Operations — loading and parsing directory contents
Finding Special Directories — how to locate special directories such as the trash and desktop
Asynchronous File I/O — allows for non-blocking file operations
Copy Engine — asynchronous copy/move/delete engine
Module Callbacks — registering for special callbacks from gnome-vfs module operations
Standard Callbacks — module callbacks pre-defined by gnome-vfs

GnomeVFS file operations are, for the most part, patterned after their POSIX equivalents, with the systematic difference that they accept URIs rather than paths on the local filesystem. This makes them easy to learn as if you are already familiar with basic commands such as open(), seek(), write(), etc you will feel right at home with GnomeVFS after learning a little about URIs.

GnomeVFS also provides asynchronous versions of these basic operations for allowing application developers to provide non-blocking file I/O without the use of threads.