In this chapter, we cover the methods for handling files and directories as well as the methods for actually writing and reading back information to and from files. This chapter also shows you the object serialization mechanism that lets you store objects as easily as you can store text or numeric data. We finish the chapter with a discussion of regular expressions, even though they are not actually related to streams and files. We couldn't find a better place to handle that topic, and apparently neither could the Java team-the regular expression API specification was attached to the specification request for the "new I/O" features of SDK 1.4.