Common Lisp File Utilities

I want a sensible way to work with Unix and Windows file systems from Common Lisp.

Possible starting points:

Read about files and file i/o from Peter Seibel's excellent Practical Common Lisp book.
Use Quicklisp to install libraries such as
- CL-FAD which provides some basic functions like file-exists-p, pathname-as-file, list-directory, copy-file, etc. It has a nice manual. It is based on pathnames.
- OSICAT which provides many similar functions, and also has operations like file-permissions, make-link, read-link, file-kind, and so forth.
- UIOP, part of ASDF, which allegedly has a README file but it's a broken link, but as of this writing there is a manual here, and it is allegedly recommended over CL-FAD now by Fare, who also recommends IOLIB except that doesn't make any sense because the IOLIB manual doesn't say anything about pathnames and the tutorial that mentions that IOLIB includes a pathname library, but then never again even includes the word pathname, and so this is very frustrating. Anyway, UIOP seems to have a lot of the CL-FAD/OSICAT functions and also new stuff like pathname-parent-directory-pathname.

Hey this might be really useful

After trying to work with this stuff for a good while, I've concluded that

I still don't understand a lot about Common Lisp pathnames.
It is really hard and frustrating to try to implement functions like basename and dirname in any sensible way, even on a single Lisp.
There are no guarantees and no way to know your code is portable, because the pathname construct gives CL implementations too much flexibility.
It just shouldn't be this hard.

Fileutils

It seems like we could do a lot better by trying to entirely avoid Lisp pathnames. I want something that is: