Disclaimer : At the moment, due to lack of a Linux dev/test server, I am currently unable to test this myself. Hence me asking the question here. I will have a Linux box eventually but am currently confined to using Windows.
I am designing a webapp that will run in Tomcat 7 on Windows & Linux.
Supposing on both systems the WAR is deployed in the following locations (respectively)
/opt/Tomcat/webapps/MyApp
C:/opt/Tomcat/webapps/MyApp
The Webapp has a Servlet which needs to process files from the OS file system in the following locations
/work/logs/<logfiles>
C:/work/logs/<logfiles>
On Windows I can specify C:/work/logs and the Servlet knows to pick up this absolute path and it works fine. I suspect because the C: at the start. I know this because I have tested this.
My real question is...
On Linux, in the absence of a drive letter, if I ask it to look in /work/logs will it try to look at a relative path :
/opt/Tomcat/webapps/MyApp/work/logs
or will it look in the file system (/work/logs) as I'd like it to?
I'm asking this now because it will ultimately affect the overall design.
Leading slash in Linux means "absolute path", so you can be sure that if you use path like /work/logs/<something> it will understand it as an absolute path.
BTW if you use the same path in Windows it will work and use current disk, i.e. if tomcat's working directory is on C: it will use C: drive, however if tomcat is running on D: this drive will be used.