Check if file exists without creating it

Creating a File instance does not create a file on the file system, so the posted code will do what you require.

Starting from Java 7 you can use java.nio.file.Files.exists:

Path p = Paths.get("C:\\Users\\first.last");
boolean exists = Files.exists(p);
boolean notExists = Files.notExists(p);

if (exists) {
    System.out.println("File exists!");
} else if (notExists) {
    System.out.println("File doesn't exist!");
} else {
    System.out.println("File's status is unknown!");
}

In the Oracle tutorial you can find some details about this:

The methods in the Path class are syntactic, meaning that they operate on the Path instance. But eventually you must access the file system to verify that a particular Path exists, or does not exist. You can do so with the exists(Path, LinkOption...) and the notExists(Path, LinkOption...) methods. Note that !Files.exists(path) is not equivalent to Files.notExists(path). When you are testing a file's existence, three results are possible:

• The file is verified to exist.
• The file is verified to not exist.
• The file's status is unknown. This result can occur when the program does not have access to the file.

If both exists and notExists return false, the existence of the file cannot be verified.

When you instantiate a File, you're not creating anything on disk but just building an object on which you can call some methods, like exists().

That's fine and cheap, don't try to avoid this instantiation.

The File instance has only two fields:

private String path;
private transient int prefixLength;

And here is the constructor :

public File(String pathname) {
    if (pathname == null) {
        throw new NullPointerException();
    }
    this.path = fs.normalize(pathname);
    this.prefixLength = fs.prefixLength(this.path);
}

As you can see, the File instance is just an encapsulation of the path. Creating it in order to call exists() is the correct way to proceed. Don't try to optimize it away.