As long as the object is inside the page area (and you don't do anything funny with groups or such), all the coordinates should be positive. You can see the coordinates when you click on a node using the path editing tool.
Of course, that may not help you much with exporting the path in a format your other program will understand. For that, it would help to know what the program is and what kind of data it wants.
You can actually see the SVG path data by opening the saved .svg file in a text editor, or by using the Edit → XML Editor... tool in Inkscape. However, the SVG path syntax is quite complicated and somewhat cryptic, with dozens of single-letter commands used to describe paths potentially consisting of several different types of segments (straight lines, quadratic and cubic Bezier curves and elliptic arc segments, all with absolute and relative coordinate variants). Whatever your other program is, it probably wants something simpler.