"odswrite: zip I/O error" when in different directory?

[Peter P.]

Dear list,

I am having problems writing to an .ods spreadsheet file which is not
in the current working directory:

    retVal=odswrite("../someDir/someFile.ods", someArray, 1, "A1:Z31", "OCT")

gives the following error message:

    zip I/O error: No such file or directory
    zip error: Could not create output file (../someDir/someFile.ods)

Interestingly the return value (retVal) is "1", which would indicate
success. However, there is nothing written to this file.

The whole thing works while being in the same directory as the file to
write to. Could it be that the folder path is not correctly passed to
zip (I seem to recall that .ods files might in fact be zipped .xml files).

Other ods-related functions (odsread, odsfinfo, can access the file in different
directories).

Please note that I am using octave 3.8.1 on Debian, with package
octave-io 2.2.2-1 and without octave-java installed. I understand that
the "OCT" way of writing files does not require java.

I can still manually cd to the respective directory and call odswrite
as workaround, just curious if I am doing something wrong.

thank you for all pointers!
P