"compile stars" should work when run from any directory
The StellarAtmospheres page says (correctly) that Cloudy must be run with the compile stars
command from the data directory. However, I don't see the logical need for this restriction since Cloudy already knows where the data directory is.
Would it be sufficient to just prepend chDataPath
to all the filenames?
And yes, I was bitten by this due to not reading the instructions carefully enough...