GIO (Gnome Input/Output) is a library, designed to present programmers with a modern and usable interface to a virtual file system.
It allows applications to access local and remote files with a single consistent API, which was designed "to overcome the shortcomings of GnomeVFS" and be "so good that developers prefer it over raw POSIX calls.
GIO is free and open-source software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Beyond these, GIO provides facilities for file monitoring, asynchronous I/O and filename completion.
Implementations for various network file systems are provided by the GVfs package as loadable modules.