I just had a case where I needed an absolute path to a file inside of my Mulesoft deployment. As I do not know where the archive is going to be deployed and different stages for test, integration and production could be supported, environment based properties were not the best solution.

However, I finally came across the placeholder ${app.home}, which always contains the path to the current Mule ESB deployment. Maybe, it helps you as well if you ever have a situation where you have to use absolute paths inside you application.