Dunce (de-UNC)

In Windows the regular paths (C:\foo) are supported by all programs, but have lots of bizarre restrictions for backwards compatibility with MS-DOS. There are also Windows NT UNC paths (\\?\C:\foo), which are more robust and with fewer gotchas, but are rarely supported by Windows programs. Even Microsoft's own!

This crate converts Windows UNC paths to the MS-DOS-compatible format whenever possible, but leaves UNC paths as-is when they can't be unambiguously expressed in a simpler way. This allows legacy programs to access all paths they can possibly access, and doesn't break any paths for UNC-aware programs.

In Rust the worst UNC offender is the fs::canonicalize() function. This crate provides a drop-in replacement for it that returns paths you'd expect.

On non-Windows platforms these functions leave paths unmodified, so it's safe to use them unconditionally for all platforms.