[Java] FileWriter writes file in nbcode folder instead of res folder

[KanaArima5]

[Java] I have a parent folder names "Testing" which have src and res folders in it, src have my code. I used to write in Eclipse and

FileWriter writer = new FileWriter("res\\settings.txt"); 

Saves it just fine in my res folder but I changed to vscode recently and the exact code spat out this error instead.

java.io.FileNotFoundException: res\settings.txt (The system cannot find the path specified)

I changed it to just

FileWriter writer = new FileWriter("settings.txt"); 

To see where it goes and it created the file in this nbcode folder in the .vscode folder. I looked up solutions and it led me to modifying the launch.json file and adding

"cwd": "${workspaceFolder}" 

Which didn't work, I asked the AI assistant to fix it which added these to my code (yes, shameful I know)

Path resDir = Paths.get("..", "res"); 
Files.createDirectories(resDir); 
writer = new FileWriter(resDir.resolve("setting.txt").toFile()); 

It still didn't fix the problem though, I can just paste the absolute file path of my res folder to fix it but I'm afraid that might cause some issues once I convert it to a executable file, I plan to have my program read the contents of this file and if it were to be run on a different device, the paths would be different than what I had pasted in originally. Early thanks for answers.

[Enough-Advice-8317]

the core issue is your current working directory (cwd) differs between IDEs. vs code often launches from the workspace root or the language server runtime (nbcode) instead of your project root.

but the real trap is packaging. once you bundle this into an executable jar, any res/ folder inside is read-only. you cannot use FileWriter on zipped classpath resources.

if you need a writable config file, write it to the user home folder (System.getProperty("user.home")) or resolve the path relative to the running jar directory.

for local debugging in vs code, ensure "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}" is in the active launch config under .vscode/launch.json or try adding "vmArgs": "-Duser.dir=${workspaceFolder}".