# Filename class

There is likely a way to do what I’m about to blog about, but I thought this might be useful in case there isn’t. Basically, I want a File object, but without the necessity of it actually being a file on the filesystem. For example, I’d kind of like to call "/tmp/myfile.txt".dirname and get "/tmp" back.

Ruby’s File class does not allow the following, unless /tmp/myfile.txt actually exists:

  f = File.new("/tmp/myfile.txt")

And what’s worse (imo), you can’t do this once you have the file handle:

  f.dirname

But it does allow this:

  File.dirname("/tmp/myfile.txt")

When you have a lot of this kind of thing going on (getting dirname, basename, extname, etc.) it gets tiresome to type “File” all over the place. What we really need is a Filename object. And it should proxy methods to the File.* class methods.

Readme taken from [original blog post](http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/07/24/working-with-file-names/)