I know this as posted ages ago however its the number 1 post in google and has no answer.
NGINX uses a path relative to where it was started from when it comes to reading sockets at least. I am unsure if this affects additional functionality.
At first I thought it was reading from the compile prefix but this doesnt seem to be the case and I also dont see any documentation on this.
Here is an example.
Starting NGINX manually from the NGINX folder
cd ~/nginx; sbin/nginx
Now all SOCKET paths are relative to ~/nginx
However;
cd ~; nginx/sbin/nginx
SOCKET paths are now relative to ~
Just figured I would help document.