Whether or not it's a "problem" depends in large part on how you expect
to use the returned absolute path.

Longtime Mac developers know that absolute paths are generally not
useful for numerous reasons.  I haven't done much work with File objects
there in Java, but I know that some non-Java environments display the
file's name differently than they would when including it in an absolute
path string for encoding reasons.

So the question I would ask is whether the getName method on the File
object displays this same changed string as seen in the absolute path.  
If not, and if you truly need the absolute path, you might instead
consider traversing from the file, via its getParent method, up channel
to the root volume name.  You might also want to keep in mind that,
prior to Mac OS X 10.4, the boot volume was not available via /Volumes,
whereas in 10.4 there's automatically a symbolic link created under
/Volumes with the name of the boot volume.  That means, for instance,
that my PowerBook's "Macintosh HD" root directory can now be correctly
referred to as "/" or as "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/".

= Steve =