C file never found - c

Question

I'm making a socket server that will for example take using input like "localhost:8080/WWW/index.html" and it will return the index.html file. I'm able to parse the request so that when someone inputs that I will have a buffer of "/WWW/index.html" and from the location of my program if I did vim /WWW/index.html I would open if but for some reason my code always says that the file is not found. Here is the following code...
char* parseRequest(char* request) {
//assume file paths are no more than 256 bytes + 1 for null.
char *buffer = malloc(sizeof(char)*257);
memset(buffer, 0, 257);
if(fnmatch("GET * HTTP/1.*", request, 0)) return 0;
sscanf(request, "GET %s HTTP/1.", buffer);
return buffer;
}
int fileExists(const char *fname){
FILE *file;
if(file = fopen(fname, "r"))
{
fclose(file);
return 1;
}
return 0;
}
recv(sock,buffer,255,0);
//reading inputted directory
char *dir = parseRequest(buffer);
if(fileExists(dir) == 1){
send(sock, "File found", 200, 0);
}else{
send(sock, "404: File not found", 200, 0);
}

Answer 1

Where dir is equal to "/WWW/index.html"
#define MAXBUF 256
#define DOCUMENTS_ROOT "/home/longbear/hw4"
char path[MAXBUF] = DOCUMENTS_ROOT;
strcat(path, dir);
.
.
.
Now you should be able to open the file at path.