How to combine/join file paths in Gradle/Groovy

One might think that joining (or combining) two file paths together with Groovy would be an easy thing to do. I’m used to “nice” methods from Ruby like File.join (see How to do a safe join pathname in ruby?):

File.join("path", "to", "join")

As it turns out, there is no such method in Groovy. However, here are two easy ways to safely combine paths in Groovy (which I use in my Gradle build):

import java.nio.file.Paths // only needed for second example

def dir1 = "/the/path"
def dir2 = "to/join"

println new File(dir1, dir2)
println Paths.get(dir1, dir2)
// -> both print "\the\path\to\join" (on my Windows machine)