The default load/attach directory does not behave as the documentation states

[nthiery]

The first Help page of the notebook states: ``Load is relative to
the path you started the notebook in.''

However this is not the case. Even though load_attach_path
contains ".", it seems "." is relative to the temporary directory
for the execution of the cell.

As a workaround, one can do::

sage: load_attach_path(DIR)

and then things work as claimed.

[kcrisman]

See also #169 though of course hopefully "load" still works (though I believe the magic %load does not?).

[kcrisman]

There are two different types of load, too.

Use "load filename.sage" and "load filename.py". Load is relative to the path you started the notebook in.

Use "save obj1 obj2 ..." and "load obj1 obj2 ...".

(This latter is clarified in #292.)

Anyway, this might potentially be fixed at the same time as http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/12711 which points out that we could make the default directory be the DATA directory. It turns out this should be pretty easy to do, at least it was for load_session and save_session at http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/17482 .