Best way to determine if two path reference to same file in Windows?

Question

How would I compare 2 strings to determine if they refer to the same path in Win32 using C/C++?

While this will handle a lot of cases it misses some things:

Answer 1

Filesystem library

Since C++17 you can use the standard filesystem library. Include it using #include . You can access it even in older versions of C++, see footnote.

The function you are looking for is equivalent, under namespace std::filesystem:

bool std::filesystem::equivalent(const std::filesystem::path& p1, const filesystem::path& p2 );

To summarize from the documentation: this function takes two paths as parameters and returns true if they reference the same file or directory, false otherwise. There is also a noexcept overload that takes a third parameter: an std::error_code in which to save any possible error.

Example

#include 
#include 
//...

int main() {
    std::filesystem::path p1 = ".";
    std::filesystem::path p2 = fs::current_path();
    std::cout << std::filesystem::equivalent(p1, p2);
    //...
}

Output:

1

Using filesystem before C++17

To use this library in versions prior to C++17 you have to enable experimental language features in your compiler and include the library in this way: #include . You can then use its functions under the namespace std::experimental::filesystem. Please note that the experimental filesystem library may differ from the C++17 one. See the documentation here.
For example:

#include 
//...
std::experimental::filesystem::equivalent(p1, p2);