Is this the only way to solve this problem? Can we not tell the sftp module to use a certain starting directory instead?

Programs changing working directory by themselves causes relative paths (if they're ever used) to break

Yeah, the alternative is discussed in#3620. But like Kyle mentions it's a quite involved. This would allow us to fix it immediately whereas if we go the alternative approach not sure when we'd get around to it.

Are there any relative paths used by the agent? I for one can't find any. The only file we write (to my knowledge) is a log file and that one is opened earlier and uses an absolute path.

@deansheather thinking about this some more, I failed to consider the effect this will have on tests. Even if nothing breaks today, there's bound to be some breakage (e.g. looking uptestdata/) down the line.

Because of that, I would consider:

1. Moving thiscli/agent.go, disabling the chdir in test-mode and adding a hidden test flag to enable it for one particular test running the agent as a separate command
2. Forking the sftp package and adding adding a flag for changing the initial directory (have not validated the how plausible this is)

We could also contribute it upstream