You might use Boost Filesystem.
It has the added weight of being cross-platform; this is obviously also a potential advantage. Note the bolded API reference below in case you want to check it out: GetFileInformationByHandle.
equivalent
bool equivalent(const path& p1, const path& p2);
bool equivalent(const path& p1, const path& p2, system::error_code& ec);
Effects: Determines file_status s1 and s2, as if by status(p1) and status(p2), respectively.
Returns: true, if sf1 == sf2 and p1 and p2 resolve to the same file system entity, else false.
Two paths are considered to resolve to the same file system entity if two candidate entities reside on the same device at the same location. This is determined as if by the values of the POSIX stat structure, obtained as if by stat() for the two paths, having equal st_dev values and equal st_ino values.
[Note: POSIX requires that "st_dev must be unique within a Local Area Network". Conservative POSIX implementations may also wish to check for equal st_size and st_mtime values. Windows implementations may use GetFileInformationByHandle() as a surrogate for stat(), and consider "same" to be equal values for dwVolumeSerialNumber, nFileIndexHigh, nFileIndexLow, nFileSizeHigh, nFileSizeLow, ftLastWriteTime.dwLowDateTime, and ftLastWriteTime.dwHighDateTime. -- end note]
Throws: filesystem_error if (!exists(s1) && !exists(s2)) || (is_other(s1) && is_other(s2)), otherwise as specified in Error reporting.
