If you were willing to allow for potential escape characters and acknowledge (to the user) the fact that the path might not have a file name, you could write:

If you were willing to allow for potential escape characters and acknowledge (to the user) the fact that the path might not have a file name, you could write: println!("file name: {:?}", path.file_name()); or just for escape characters, but only if the file name existed: if let Some(name) = path.file_name() { println!("file name: {:?}", name); } Note that the unwrap() isn't boilerplate, in either case: if you are using `unwrap()` you are implicitly saying that you know for a fact that the file name is present (the first time) and a valid UTF-8 string (the second time), which isn't guaranteed in the general case on all platforms. If you wanted to write this more robustly, and these weren't guaranteed, you would need to explicitly take care of those cases. I/O has lots of tricky error cases, and Rust usually requires you to acknowledge that. You can avoid dealing with those cases with unwrap(), or you can explicitly handle them. Personally, I much prefer this to being surprised only when the weird error case unexpectedly turns up because I never considered the situation in question, and that's generally how Rust handles things, but it depends on the task. It may make Rust less appropriate for quick scripting tasks, for example, where the domain is well-defined and the script is not likely to be reused (but I find that those scripts have an annoying way of getting reused anyway).