Thanks, Zach. That's exactly what I needed to know.

I tried it in a fresh emacs & slime setup and see that M-x cd calls swank:set-default-directory, after which *DEFAULT-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS* has been changed as expected. What's curious is that I periodically run into cases where it doesn't seem to be working. Of course, at the moment my working emacs slime (recently started) is behaving as it should. Next time it acts up I'll take a look at the value of *default-pathname-defaults* to see if it is in fact being changed. I bet not.

Regards,
Jeff

On 06/11/2012 10:02 AM, Zach Beane wrote:

Common Lisp uses the standard variable *DEFAULT-PATHNAME-DEFAULTS* to
control how relative pathnames are turned into absolute pathnames for
filesystem operations.

http://l1sp.org/cl/*default-pathname-defaults* has more info.