We study the rectilinear path problem in the presence of disjoint axis parallel rectangular obstacles in the read-only and in-place setup. The input to the problem is a set R of n axis-parallel rectangular obstacles in R 2 . The objective is to answer the following query efficiently. Path-Query ( p , q ) : Given a pair of points p and q , report an axis-parallel path from p to q avoiding the obstacles in R . In the read-only setup, we show that Path-Query ( p , q ) problem can be solved in O ( n 2 s + n log s ) time using O ( s ) extra space. We also show that the existence of an x -monotone path and reporting it, if it exists, can be done with the same asymptotic time complexity. If the objective is to test the existence of an x y -monotone path between the given pair of points p and q avoiding the obstacles, and report it if exists, then our proposed algorithm needs O ( n 2 s + n log s + M s log n ) time with O ( s ) extra space, where M s is the time complexity for computing the median of n elements in the read-only setup using O ( s ) extra space. Finally, we show that when the obstacles are unit squares instead of rectangles of arbitrary size, then there always exists a path of O ( n ) links between a pair of query points, and the path can be reported in O ( n n ) time using O ( 1 ) extra work-space. It is also shown that there is an instance where the minimum number of links in a path between a pair of specified points is O ( n ) . The objective of the Path-Query ( p , q ) in the in-place setup is to preprocess the input rectangles in a data structure in the input array itself such that for any pair of query points p and q , a rectilinear path can be reported efficiently. Here we propose an algorithm with O ( n log n ) preprocessing time and O ( n 3 / 4 + χ ) query time, where χ is the number of links (bends) in the path. Both the preprocessing and query answering need O ( 1 ) extra space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]