Summary

Add a system property jdk.io.File.failIfEmptyPath which when true will cause various java.io.File methods to revert to their behavior prior to JDK-8024695 with respect to the empty path.

Problem

The commit which resolved JDK-8024695 caused a number of failures in JDK 25 in external libraries which were relying on observable legacy inconsistent, undocumented behavior of a java.io.File which was created from an empty path. The File class was changed to consider an empty pathname string as being equivalent to the current working directory. This resulted in applications depending on those libraries encountering errors they could not circumvent.

Solution

Add a system property jdk.io.File.failIfEmptyPath to make java.io.File handle the empty path as it did prior to JDK 25.

Specification

There is no specification change. The system property, if set, merely causes access to the current directory (as implied by an empty pathname string) to fail.