If a job is submitted in a directory name with %, e.g., %u, --output expands this leading to a job that does not start (except if the diretory named with the path expansion happen to be there).

Test case:
sysop@fe1:~/test/percent-issue/test-%u$ find .. -type f
../test-%u/test.sh
sysop@fe1:~/test/percent-issue/test-%u$ cat test.sh
#! /bin/bash
#SBATCH --output out.out
date
sysop@fe1:~/test/percent-issue/test-%u$ sbatch -t 5 test.sh
Submitted batch job 702039

Expected result:
The output ends up in the file out.out in the current directory (test-%u).

Actual result:
The output ends up in the file out.out in the %-expanded directory (test-sysop).
If the path option expanded directory does not exist, the job fails immediately.

sysop@fe1:~/test/percent-issue/test-%u$ find .. -type f
../test-%u/test.sh
../test-sysop/out.out


Fix:
As far as I can see, this can be fixed by simply prepending cwd *after* expanding the path options in fname_create in
/src/slurmd/common/fname.c