# V631. Defining absolute path to file or directory is considered a poor coding style. Consider inspecting the 'Foo' function call.

The analyzer has detected a potential error that occurs when calling a function intended to handle files. An absolute path to a file or directory is passed into a function in one of the actual arguments. Using a function in such a way is dangerous, as there may be cases that this path doesn't exist on the user's computer.

Consider an example of incorrect code:

    FILE *text = fopen("c:\\TEMP\\text.txt", "r");

A better way is to get the path to a file on certain conditions.

This is the correct code:

    string fullFilePath = GetFilePath() + "text.txt";
    FILE *text = fopen(fullFilePath.c_str(), "r");

This diagnostic is classified as:

CWE-30 CWE-37 CWE-39

You can look at examples of errors detected by the V631 diagnostic.