If you were using say, Allegro CL on Windows, I doubt you had any difficulties accessing the file system.
Not finalized yet, but soon: https://isocpp.org/std/status
(It is basically a standardization of boost::filesystem)
Here are the MSDN docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-CA/library/hh874694.aspx
If you were using say, Allegro CL on Windows, I doubt you had any difficulties accessing the file system.