Testing file existence using NSURL

Posted by Peter Hosey on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Peter Hosey
Published on 2009-12-18T11:45:51Z Indexed on 2010/04/24 12:03 UTC
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Snow Leopard introduced many new methods to use NSURL objects to refer to files, not pathnames or Core Services' FSRefs.

However, there's one task I can't find a URL-based method for: Testing whether a file exists. I'm looking for a URL-based version of -[NSFileManager fileExistsAtPath:]. Like that method, it should return YES if the URL describes anything, whether it's a regular file, a directory, or anything else.

I could attempt to look up various resource values, but none of them are explicitly guaranteed to not exist if the file doesn't, and some of them (e.g., NSURLEffectiveIconKey) could be costly if it does.

I could just use NSFileManager's fileExistsAtPath:, but if there's a more modern method, I'd prefer to use that.

Is there a simple method or function in Cocoa, CF, or Core Services that's guaranteed/documented to tell me whether a given file (or file-reference) URL refers to a file-system object that exists?

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