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.