Do I need to set paths to files?

What I need to know is if in the following code I need to set a path to files, i.e. /path/to/users.dat.

I am a self taught programmer and mainly deal with PHP and CFML with MySQL and not C++.

This is designed for a unix based system and designed to compile using g++. It updates the backend to an online game and is run every X minutes via cron.

Here is the code:

#include <string>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <iostream.h>
#include <fstream.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <math.h>
#include "Lupdate.h"
// WARNING: MAX structures[5] = 50000


Player::~Player()
{
delete []player_path;
delete []island;
delete []empire;
}
Player::Player(char *path)
{
char *new_path;
player_path = new char[strlen(path)+1];
new_path = new char[strlen(path)+6];

strcpy(player_path, path);
strcpy(new_path, path);
strcat(new_path, "/main");
strcpy(most_powerful, "/home/httpd/cgi-bin/most_powerful.dat");

island = new char[5];
empire = new char[5];

// load player, and if inactive, delete player
if(load_player(new_path))
{
delete_player(path);
}
delete []new_path;
}

bool Player::load_player(char *path)
{
ifstream fin;
string data_type;
int activity, data, slashes, j, k, i;

fin.open(path);
if(fin.fail()){ cerr << "Unable to open file " << path << endl; exit(1);}
//cout << "The file name is " << path << endl;
//cout << "Player Path is " << player_path << endl;

So every do I need to insert a /path/to/file.dat every time I see the word "path" or "*path"?

Thank you,
Kirk Fickert

From my understanding of your problem, if the file is in the same directory as your program, you need not specify the path to it. If it is in a different directory, but is relative to the directory of your program, you could use something like "./datadirectory/files.dat", or "../data/file.dat". If it is in some arbitrary directory, then you need to specify the full path to it. I believe that this should be the path to which the user running the prorgam can see, and not the absolute path. For instance, if you need to access "/home/user1/datadir/file.dat", and user1 is running the prorgam, and he sees /home/user1 as the root, then you would need the program to access "/datadir/file.dat", since if you put "/home/user1/datadir/file.dat", the program would think that this is a directory off of user1's root, which is: "/home/user1/home/user1/datadir/file.dat". So, it depends on what the user can 'see' as root.

thanks, that helps to clarify things a bit.