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The Java™ Tutorials
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Basic I/O
I/O Streams
Byte Streams
Character Streams
Buffered Streams
Scanning and Formatting
Scanning
Formatting
I/O from the Command Line
Data Streams
Object Streams
File I/O (Featuring NIO.2)
What Is a Path? (And Other File System Facts)
The Path Class
Path Operations
File Operations
Checking a File or Directory
Deleting a File or Directory
Copying a File or Directory
Moving a File or Directory
Managing Metadata (File and File Store Attributes)
Reading, Writing, and Creating Files
Random Access Files
Creating and Reading Directories
Links, Symbolic or Otherwise
Walking the File Tree
Finding Files
Watching a Directory for Changes
Other Useful Methods
Legacy File I/O Code
Summary
Questions and Exercises
Trail: Essential Classes
Lesson: Basic I/O
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# Summary

The `java.io` package contains many classes that your programs can use to read and write data. Most of the classes implement sequential access streams. The sequential access streams can be divided into two groups: those that read and write bytes and those that read and write Unicode characters. Each sequential access stream has a speciality, such as reading from or writing to a file, filtering data as its read or written, or serializing an object.

The `java.nio.file` package provides extensive support for file and file system I/O. This is a very comprehensive API, but the key entry points are as follows:

- The `Path` class has methods for manipulating a path.
- The `Files` class has methods for file operations, such as moving, copy, deleting, and also methods for retrieving and setting file attributes.
- The `FileSystem` class has a variety of methods for obtaining information about the file system.

More information on NIO.2 can be found on the OpenJDK: NIO project website on java.net. This site includes resources for features provided by NIO.2 that are beyond the scope of this tutorial, such as multicasting, asynchronous I/O, and creating your own file system implementation.

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