This quick code tip shows how to check whether a file exists in Java. The Java code example used in the tutorial uses the NIO API's java.nio.file.Path and java.nio.file.Files classes to determine whether a file at the given path in the file system exists or not. [su_box title="Java NIO-based code example to check for existence of a file " style="soft" box_color="#fcba43" title_color="#00000" radius="4" Class="for-shortcodebox"][java]package com.javabrahman.corejava; import java.nio.file.Files; import java.nio.file.Path; import java.nio.file.Paths; public class FileExists { public static void main(String args[]){ //Example of file which doesn't exist Path filePath_1= Paths.get("C:\\xyz.txt"); boolean fileExists_1= Files.exists(filePath_1); System.out.println("File 'xyz.txt' exists: "+fileExists_1); //Example of file which exists Path filePath_2= Paths.get("C:\\JavaBrahman\\LEVEL1\\file1.txt"); boolean fileExists_2= Files.exists(filePath_2); System.out.println("File ‘file1.txt’ exists: "+fileExists_2); } } [/java][/su_box]  OUTPUT of the above code[su_note note_color="#1a1a1a" text_color="#DAD9D7"]File 'xyz.txt' exists: false File 'file1.txt' exists: true[/su_note] Explanation of the code

• The above class FileExists checks for existence of 2 files - xyz.txt(which doesn't exist) and file1.txt(which exists) at their respective paths mentioned in the code.
• The check for file existence is done in 2 steps(which need to be repeated for each file check). These steps are -
  1. Create an instance of Path using Paths.get() method with the complete file path passed as a String to it.
  2. Use Files.exist() method with the Path instance variable created in step 1 passed to it as parameter. Files.exist() returns a boolean value indicating the existence of the file - true if the file exists and false if it doesn't.
• In the above example, the output is as expected - check for xyz.txt returns false as the file does not exist, while the returned value is true for file1.txt as it exists at the given file path.