The default config file check doesn't work in all cases as it fails with:

ENOENT: no such file or directory, stat '/~/.maxctrl.cnf'

This suggests that os.homedir() is empty and would make sense for users without home directories.

Turns out that this is caused by the path combination code assuming that the directory returned by process.cwd() never has a trailing slash which isn't the case when the process is started from the root directory.

A workaround to this problem is to change the current directory to anything other than the root directory (e.g. /tmp).