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"Thomas J. Wye" <tjw00@bayarea.net> writes:
:>Synopsis:       <File permission break Bourne Shell CGI scripts>
:getcwd() failed: Permission denied

getcwd() uses opendir()/readdir() on successive "../" all the way back
to the root.  If a parent directory isn't readable you can't get the cwd
for it.  There is an extension to that relating to mount points.
If your perl scripts work, then that just indicates that perl doesn't try
to do a getcwd() during initialisation.
sh tries to do it to initialise its variable : PWD
I don't know what it did before.

There's a patch at the bottom, you can use, to make it silently continue
though its behaviour on failed getcwd() is now different from /bin/pwd
I have no idea what any standards may indicate on the matter.

Here are a couple of examples:

1)

% mkdir t
% mkdir t/t
% chmod 111 t
% cd t/t
% /bin/pwd
pwd: Permission denied


2)

# ls -ld /src
drwx------  5 root  wheel  512 Mar  5 14:56 /src/
# mount /src
# ls -ld /src
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  wheel  512 Mar  5 14:56 /src/
% cd /src		# I'm not root here
% /bin/pwd
pwd: Permission denied
% ls -ld ..
ls: ..: Permission denied



*** /usr/src/bin/sh/cd.c	Sat Jan 11 23:07:07 1997
- --- /usr/obj/bin/sh/cd.c	Thu Mar  6 16:44:18 1997
***************
*** 324,331 ****
  	 */
  #if defined(__NetBSD__) || defined(__svr4__)
  	if (getcwd(buf, sizeof(buf)) == NULL)
! 		error("getcwd() failed: %s", strerror(errno));
! 	curdir = savestr(buf);
  #else
  	{
  		char *p;
- --- 324,332 ----
  	 */
  #if defined(__NetBSD__) || defined(__svr4__)
  	if (getcwd(buf, sizeof(buf)) == NULL)
! 		curdir = savestr(".");
! 	else
! 		curdir = savestr(buf);
  #else
  	{
  		char *p;
- -- 
Geoff Wing [mason@primenet.com.au]   Technical Manager
  Phone    : +61-3-9818 2977         PrimeNet - Internet Consultancy
  Facsimile: +61-3-9819 3788         Web : <URL:http://www.primenet.com.au/>
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