MINOR: tools: add a few functions to simply check for a file's existence

MINOR: tools: add a few functions to simply check for a file's existence

At many places we'd like to be able to simply construct a path from a
format string and check if that path corresponds to an existing file,
directory etc. Here we add 3 functions, a generic one to test that a
path corresponds to a given file mode (e.g. S_IFDIR, S_IFREG etc), and
two other ones specifically checking for a file or a dir for easier
use.