At the moment WiredTiger configuration options accept paths to any location on disk, and creates files and directories as long as file system permissions allow it.

It may be valuable to add a new option to wiredtiger_open that limits where WiredTiger creates files to the database home directory.

There are difficulties with such a solution:

• The new option isn't useful if it can easily be overridden, so it would need to be excluded from environment or base configuration settings.
• It is difficult to guarantee that a path doesn't navigate out of the current directory across all platforms and configurations. If we can't guarantee, it may be unhelpful to provide the option at all.