pwd gives segmentation fault

[Xiaochun He]

On 25 Oct 1998, Magnus Ahltorp wrote:

> > Everything seemed working fine except that the "pwd" command gave me
> > the following error message - "pwd: cannot get current directory" when I 
> > accessed a remote AFS cell.  I did follow the recipe from the
> > arla-0.13/INSTALL file to fix the problem.   However, the problem became
> > worse and the new error message was - "segmentation fault (core dumped)"
> > when put "/lib/getcwd.so" in /etc/ld.so.preload.  What did I do wrong? 
> 
> The segmentation fault, was it when trying to run "pwd"? In that case,
> I have never seen it before, but I _have_ seen it on setuid programs
> (and netscape). The code that getcwd.so consists of is very
> straight-forward, and I doubt that there are any bugs in it.
> 

The segmentation fault was given when I tried to run "pwd".  This was
true even for running "pwd" on a local file system, e.g., /usr, /home.
I had to be very careful while editing /etc/ld.so.preload (i.e., kept
the editor open) in order to recover the original "pwd" function.

> There have been speculations that the problem lies in the dynamic
> linker, but this has not been confirmed.
> 
> If it occurs when running all programs, it's very bad, since the
> getcwd.so is very vital for system functionality (as you have seen,
> cwd fetching does not work very well without it). If you could do some
> more testing, like when it segfaults and not, it would be very
> valuable.
> 

I will do some more tests and let you know the results.  Thanks.

Xiaochun He
Georgia State University