Problem adding std::filesystem to CMake Project

Question

I am new to CMake projects and I want to use the file system library in my project. I am running Ubuntu 18.04 with GCC 8.2 and CMake 3.13. In order to achieve this I tried t

Answer 1

Besides from @lubgr's answer. I think a more complete way is to also do try_compile to see that you can actually use the filesystem header. This in my opinion is better because some compilers are not supporting std::filesystem yet. Also in gcc 7.x you have the filesystem under experimental namespace. This way you can have a separate try_compile in the else clause and detect that.

Here is the related cmake for it

# set everything up for c++ 17 features
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17)
# Don't add this line if you will try_compile with boost.
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD_REQUIRED ON)
# test that filesystem header actually is there and works
try_compile(HAS_FS "${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/temp" 
"${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/tests/has_filesystem.cc" 
            CMAKE_FLAGS -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD_REQUIRED=ON
            LINK_LIBRARIES stdc++fs)
if(HAS_FS)
    message(STATUS "Compiler has filesystem support")
else()
#   .... You could also try searching for boost::filesystem here.
    message(FATAL_ERROR "Compiler is missing filesystem capabilities")
endif(HAS_FS)

The file tests/has_filesystem.cc is very simple

#include 

namespace fs = std::filesystem;

int main()
{
    fs::path aPath {"../"};

    return 0;
}

You could in your else clause try_compile for boost::filesystem and pass a directive that can be used in your source file where you decide if you want to use c++17 filesystem or boost.