Well judging by the code sample showing what you're doing to access the input data it's obvious . . .

Oh, never mind.

(The answer is, of course, it depends. But since it depends on how you're using your "input data" no one will be able to say for sure. If you're for example reading files then you should be able to give either an absolute path or a relative path from wherever you're being run to open and it'll handle things just fine (the problem comes in when you may not be able to formulate a constant relative path (e.g. your code is run from several different directories that are at different depths relative to the input files so it'd require varying numbers of "../"s to get back)). If you're running other utilities via system or backticks then it depends on the ability of those programs to take relative or absolute paths (but again you'd have the same issue possibly with relative paths as if you opened them yourself).)