Error. File not found: C:\somedirectory\file.txt
*opens C:\somedirectory\ * *looks at file.txt*
*runs program again*
Error. File not found: C:\somedirectory\file.txt
*changes directory it is looking in, copies file to new directory*
Error. File blank: D:\somedirectory\file.txt
*cry... no it isn't*

I just need to deploy this contractors code... supposedly it ran on another system, but the endless Spring configs hate me... :(

Are you sure the thing is running on the machine its supposed to? or are you looking at the wrong machine?

same reality? time line? same year? (a real problem!)

You code on Windows? Do you have no shame?

@Boogie probably her company has given windows computer

Can't you put the file in some sort of resources folder?

Is is confusing relative with absoulte paths? Happend to me once that something only accepted a relative one.

Some programs also have problems with diacritics or other localised characters or spaces in paths... It's actually a common problem because most people don't test such cases.

@haze non-ASCII filenames are pretty difficult under Windows because that was introduced before UTF-8. In order to deal with that, you need to use the wide character functions in the Win API.

The problem is that Windows' UTF-16 doesn't map transparently to C style string handling so that ALL functions need to be written with wide characters.

If it's a program ported from Linux, then it will be designed for UTF-8 so that it just handles file name strings as blobs of zero terminated data.

This is especially insidious with characters that visually look like ones in the ASCII range, but are actually higher code points in unicode.

Non-ASCII filename, no Read Contents of Folder perms, etc.

Drop it in C:\Users\Public and see what happens

Don't tend to use Users\Public as it's a network drive. The file is in the (supposed) usual location and the name looks pretty simple, and have tried passing in the location multiple ways, and using a property file in the jar itself as a default, I was trying to build and test locally before troubleshooting Jenkins. Their devs say they could run it locally and on their servers, but am supposed to be getting it running on our servers. I thought going from file not found to file empty was progress but... dunno. My current plan is screw it, give it to ops and see if it likes the server better (yes, I'll tell ops that's what I'm doing - I don't hate that ops person). Not my code anyways...

As far as coding on Windows... I could get a Mac, but half of our internal stuff doesn't work on it (no chat/IM, half the dev tools missing without approved alternatives), so not really wanting to deal with that.