I created a spare parm in one node, an operator path, so I can point to another node in the scene.

now that I have that and I point to this node as relative path,
../geo1/file1

with python how can I get the absolute path like /obj/geo1/file1


I try
grabbing the parm and using unexpandedString() or I thought that might be a type of .eval()

do we have a method for it?

You can ask your node with the parameter on it to give you the node the parm points to, then get the path from there. hou.Node.node() will accept a relative path so you can look for the node relative to the main node.
node = hou.node(“/obj/nodewithparm”)
relPath = node.evalParm(“path”)
relNode = node.node(relPath)
fullpath = relNode.path()

cool! I thought the
node.node()
only worked if you keep diving inside.

you can also do your_parm.parmsReferencingThis() and then do parm.node() and will give you the node of that parm

then you can do a_node.relativePathTo(other_node)