How can I manipulate Windows paths from a Linux app and vice versa in .NET Core?

Question

I'm building a data transfer tool that may be deployed to either a Windows or Linux Docker container that must instruct SQL Server to take a database snapshot. Additionally, SQL Server may be on either Windows or Linux and I need to specify where on the server the .ss file will go. I've been using Path.GetFilenameWithoutExtension, Path.Combine, etc but Path operations are done in the context of the OS the app is running in. I need something like WindowsPath.Combine that I can run in Linux when I'm talking to a SQL Server instance on Windows. Right now I do my own string manipulation but I'd prefer to use Path or something purpose built if possible. I know what OS I'm running on and the OS SQL Server is running on and just need an OS agnostic Path.

Answer 1

I think you'll need to make your own class of static functions to do Windows specific path manipulation. "C:\MyDir\MyFile.ext" can actually be the name of a file on Linux.

You can look at various implementations of .NET Path and you can see that it is just using string manipulation:

https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/mscorlib/system/io/path.cs

I suggest just starting with the methods you need. For example:

public static class PathHelper
{
    public static string GetWindowsFileNameWithoutExtension(string filePath)
    {
        int backslashIndex = filePath.LastIndexOf('\\');
        int dotIndex = filePath.LastIndexOf('.');

        if (backslashIndex >= 0 && dotIndex >= 0 && dotIndex > backslashIndex)
        {
            return filePath.Substring(backslashIndex + 1, dotIndex - backslashIndex - 1);
        }

        if (dotIndex >= 0)
        {
            return filePath.Substring(0, dotIndex);
        }

        return Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(filePath);
    }
}