Thank you for reporting that!
I've just checked in the patch below.
I'll add tests to coreutils some time next week.
This bug affects only systems with openat support (glibc-2.4 and
newer and Solaris 10).
2007-02-03 Jim Meyering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Make pwd and readlink work also when run with an unreadable parent dir
on systems with openat support.
* lib/getcwd.c (__getcwd) [HAVE_PARTLY_WORKING_GETCWD]: Use the system
provided getcwd function, even when we have openat support.
Reported by Dmitry V. Levin in <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/227168>.
Index: lib/getcwd.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /sources/gnulib/gnulib/lib/getcwd.c,v
retrieving revision 1.17
diff -u -p -r1.17 getcwd.c
--- lib/getcwd.c 26 Jan 2007 22:16:55 -0000 1.17
+++ lib/getcwd.c 3 Feb 2007 00:07:43 -0000
@@ -140,13 +140,18 @@ __getcwd (char *buf, size_t size)
size_t allocated = size;
size_t used;
-#if HAVE_PARTLY_WORKING_GETCWD && !defined AT_FDCWD
+#if HAVE_PARTLY_WORKING_GETCWD
/* The system getcwd works, except it sometimes fails when it
shouldn't, setting errno to ERANGE, ENAMETOOLONG, or ENOENT. If
AT_FDCWD is not defined, the algorithm below is O(N**2) and this
is much slower than the system getcwd (at least on GNU/Linux).
So trust the system getcwd's results unless they look
- suspicious. */
+ suspicious.
+
+ Use the system getcwd even if we have openat support, since the
+ system getcwd works even when a parent is unreadable, while the
+ openat-based approach does not. */
+
# undef getcwd
dir = getcwd (buf, size);
if (dir || (errno != ERANGE && !is_ENAMETOOLONG (errno) && errno != ENOENT))
