I despise working with file paths in Java. I can never remember where, in the project’s folder structure, the jvm considers root. And it gets even more complicated once you start running your applications in a server container. However, I did find a quick way to determine where a running JVM considers root.
import java.io.File; ... File f = new File("dummy"); _log.info("file is at " + f.getAbsolutePath());
This should print out the absolute path to where this File object would be saved. You can use this as a starting point and do any sort of relative filepathing you need to from here.