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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T02:20:22+00:00

Why doesn’t File.renameTo(…) create sub-directories contained in the destination file path? For instance, File

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Why doesn’t File.renameTo(...) create sub-directories contained in the destination file path?

For instance,

File source = new File(System.getProperty("user.dir") + 
                "/src/MyFolder/MyZipFolder.zip");
File dest = new File(System.getProperty("user.dir") + 
                "/src/MyOtherFolder/MyZipFolder.zip");
System.out.println(source.renameTo(dest));

Since MyOtherFolder does not exist, this will always return false. In order for this to work, I have to ensure that all sub-directories exist either by creating them programmatically(i.e. mkdirs()), or manually. Is there a reason why this functionality was not included in this method?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The current File API isn’t very well implemented in Java. There is a lot of functionality that would be desirable in a File API that isn’t currently present such as move, copy and retrieving file metadata.

    I don’t think anyone will be able to give you an answer as to why the API is written as is. Probably a poor first draft that went live and couldn’t be changed due to backwards compatibility issues.

    These issue have been addressed in the upcoming Java 7. A entirely new API has been created to deal with files java.nio.file.Files.

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