Problem porting webapp to Linux from Windows

Question

Hello,
I'm porting a Tomcat web app from a Windows dev environment to a Linux production environment. For i/o, file references were made "portable" using, for example, this sort of declaration:
File file = System.getProperty("user.dir")+File.separator+"..[string].."+File.separator....etc.
I made this work on Windows, but it breaks on Linux because "user.dir" is not the same on the two OS's under circumstances that are otherwise the same.
It appears that on Windows, based on the default Tomcat startup script, user.dir is fixed to the directory where the app (Catalina) was started. The Windows default startup command hardwires this to the path where Tomcat is installed, while in Linux user.dir move to the directory of the class file containing the reference to the file I want.
Many people must have dealt with this in the past, but darned if I can find a solution on line. What's the cleanest way to reconcile this, work with the startup scripts or the source code?
I feel stupid. Thanks for your help.
Steve

Answer 1

There is only 1 problem I think I read about using
this approach. When you make a war of your webapp, the
getRealPath("/") can return null on some webservers,
but since I dont use war's I have no problem with thatIt's early days for me, so I expanded the WAR on the production server for now, but I probably always will because the webapp writes files into a sub-directory under WEB-INF (files I want only my servlets to get at). As I understand it, you can either use a WAR or have a full expanded directory structure, but not both.
On another point, I hadn't mentioned that I have a bean in session scope that accesses a properties file. In fact, that's where I first discovered the problem. So using your approach, I'm changing some JSP and the bean to be able to pass the ServletContext to it.