pwd: getwd: can't open ..

[Alexis Rosen]

In article <1990Oct23.032357.4645 at bushido.uucp> mnowak at bushido (Michael A. Nowak) writes:
>I recently added a new hard disk to my system.  I partitioned it with Silver-
>Lining and formatted it with newfs under A/UX.  It is mounted under /local.
>My news directory is stored there and I noticed that the newsdaily script
>was failing when it tried to do a find in /local/news.  I kept getting the
>message:  getwd: cat't open ..
>
>Now it seems that only news can't do this find.  My account can do it, as
>can other users accounts, and of course, root.  What could this mean?

Yes, this had me going for a long time. There are two ways you can get this
message. The obvious way is to try to use a volume mounted in a directory
that you don't have appropriate permissions for.  The second way is tricky:

If you compiled stuff in A/UX 1.1, and it does things with directories, it
will fail on FFS volumes in 2.0 whenever it hits a directory whose inum is
greater the 64K. The easy solution is to recompile under 2.0. If that is
not possible, you can sidestep the issue by making directories which have
smaller inode numbers, and moving the news files to them. I believe (but I
am by no means certain) that for rn, it is sufficient to do this for the
personal "News" directories it creates in your home directory (actually
"DOTDIR"), and for the directory containing the active file (usually
/usr/lib/news). You might also need to do it to /usr/local/lib/rn, or wherever
you keep files like Pnews.header.

As for Bnews, I never made it totally happy under 2.0. I got it in working
order, but it had a problem which required a bit of clever shell programming
and a cron job to deal with. I would have tried to get it right but then I
was fortunate enough to discover Cnews.

I can't possibly say enough good things about Cnews. If you're not using it,
I recommend that you do so. It's at _least_ thirty times faster than Bnews
at the important stuff- unspooling news. It's also very easy to configure
and bring up under A/UX.

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis