Bug 10240 – It should be possible to check exists and isDir/isFile with a single stat call

In std.file the functions isDir, isFile and dirEntry all throw if a path does not exist. Therefor one needs a separate stat call to test for existence. Also dirEntry does enforce again that a path exists.

There are 2 ways to solve this: 1. Either check that the file or directory exists inside the isDir/isFile functions and return false if the path does not exist or the input string doesn't designate a directory/file. This is troublesome since you have one value for 2 different semantics. 2. Create a function existsAndIsDir/File where you can call stat a single time. This means adding 2 new functions that add no extra functionality for the benefit of a micro-optimization. In my opinion we should close this as WONTFIX.

I believe the right solution add a function akin to C++17's file_status (http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/experimental/fs/file_status) which would return a struct essentially being union of https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa364946(v=vs.85).aspx on Windows and http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/stat.html on Posix. That way users would be to obtain more information in a single call. Unfortunately we have all kinds of functions defined in https://dlang.org/phobos-prerelease/std_file General, Attributes, Timestamp while a single function returning a struct would be much more useful.

> while a single function returning a struct would be much more useful... ... and more type-safe.

> I believe the right solution add a function akin to C++17's file_status (http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/experimental/fs/file_status) Here I meant this function: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/experimental/fs/status as file_status is a struct.

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