There are situations (most of them involving symbolic links) in which using absolute paths can change the meaning of the path. The most obvious is when creating

There are situations (most of them involving symbolic links) in which using absolute paths can change the meaning of the path. The most obvious is when creating a symbolic link, for instance a relative symbolic link from "README" to "README.md" will not break when the whole directory is moved. A more worrying one is that using absolute paths everywhere is vulnerable to TOCTOU issues, while relative paths can be less vulnerable (and can be combined with newer APIs like openat to reduce these issues further).