I haven’t touched SSI’s in years. I was wondering if people can give me some pointers.
I was asked to update a site, but I don’t have dev access to the server. All paths are root relative.
What would be the easiest way to make my stuff show up without having to write the ssi’s out then put them back?
Sorry, not sure what your question is here. Are there SSIs on the site currently? How much access to the server do you have? I’m assuming they must have given you some access or you wouldn’t be able to update it at all!
Yes there as SSI’s. At first I was told to view the page and do a file-> save as 
… I told them that they had to be including files somehow. I was given a zip of the actual files, and told to e-mail it when I am done.
While fighting for access, I wantt to be at least a little productive.
If you’ve got the actual files, you should be able to edit them in whatever way you need and then send them back. If you want to check out how it works, put them online and use robots.txt to block spiders, or password protect the pages, to make sure search engines don’t pick up on them.