I have some strong concerns about the semantics of FileSystem on MS Windows treating '\directory' as a relative path rather than an absolute path. For example currently... '/tmp/test.txt' asFileReference fullName --> 'C:\Users\Ben\AppData\Roaming\Pharo\images\30790\tmp\test.txt' when it _should_ go... '/tmp/test.txt' asFileReference fullName --> 'C:\tmp\x.txt' This seems to be by design per '\test\bar' below... WindowsStoreTest>>testAbsolutePath #('c:\' 'C:\temp' 'A:\temp\test') do: [:each | self assert: (WindowsStore current pathFromString: each) isAbsolute ] WindowsStoreTest>>testRelativePath #('a' 'bin\foo' 'temp\test' '\test\bar') do: [:each | self assert: (WindowsStore current pathFromString: each) isRelative ] However taking as reference the Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe)... (1) C:\> mkdir \a\b\a\c (2) C:\> cd a (3) C:\a> cd b (4) C:\a\b> cd \a (5) C:\a> observe that after 'cd \a' (4) the working directory becomes absolute 'C:\a' rather than relative 'C:\a\b\a' . Microsoft defines [1] a file name is RELATIVE to the current directory if it DOES NOT begin with: * A single backslash, for example, "\directory" or "\file.txt". This is also referred to as an ABSOLUTE path. Indeed all Windows applications I know operate this way. Using different semantics is a bug. [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx#fully_qualified_vs._re... What are your thoughts? cheers -ben