How to use fstream objects with relative path?

Question

Do I always have to specify absolute path for objects instantiated from std::fstream class? In other words, is there a way to specify just relative path to them

Answer 1

The behaviour is OS specific. Therefore, the best way to handle this IMHO is to make it somebody else's problem. Read the path to the file to open as a string from the user (e.g: command line argument, config file, env variable etc..) then pass that string directly to the constructor of fstream. Document that this is how your program behaves.

I wrote more about path manipulation here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40980510/2345997