getwd() call problems

[Jean-Francois Lamy]

teraida!mikel at decwrl.dec.com (Mikel Lechner) writes:
>kae at ihlpm.att.com (Kenneth A Edwards) writes:

>With SunOS4.0 and later releases, Sun introduced a "performance
>improvement" to the "getwd()" library call.  The library function ends up
>"stat()"ing virtually all your mounted filesystems every time your program
>tries to compute its working directory.  This is nearly guaranteed to hang
>up any process makeing a "getwd()" call when a hard-mounted NFS filesystem
>hangs.

Using trace(1) you can easily determine that getwd() will not follow
symbolic links.  So you can avoid this problem by making sure that all NFS
entries in /etc/fstab are actually symbolic links (i.e. mount on  the
symlink -- mount will follow the symlink at mount time and mount on the
directory referenced by the symlink).

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy at ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4