note 25991 rejected from function.chdir by betz

(As a newbie, I'm offering this as a comment and as a question...) The string for the directory can apparently be written as an absolute path like "c:/data/folder1/folder2/" (with optional last slash?) OR as a relative path like "folder-brother/" or ".." or "../folder-cousin/" As far as I've seen, relative means not necessarily relative to where my script is located, but to where my script has brought me - for example if I'm in the middle of parsing through a directory tree and have used opendir() & readdir() etc. Something that's surprised me is that chdir("c:/thisdir") works but if I say $dir = "c:/thisdir" then chdir($dir) does NOT work. Why? Does it have to do with globals variables? chdir($GLOBALS["dir"]) doesn't work either. Ideas, comments, answers? thanks!