On Fri, 21 May 1999, Andrei Ivanov wrote: > > shell-init: could not get current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent > > directories. > > Check your permissions on . and .. directories. They should be > chmod'd and chown'd as below. > > drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 May 2 19:21 . > drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 1024 May 2 22:23 ..
No, they shouldn't. '.' should be whatever the permissions on the current directory are, while '..' should be the permissions on the directory you reach by 'cd ..'. If you go around changing the permissions on every dot-directory as you suggest, Bad Things will result. i've tested this, suing to a normal user from root in a directory the normal user has absolutely no access to (. and .. both mode 700, owner root), and it doesn't give those errors. The only time i can recall seeing those errors is when the cwd is moved or removed. Just now, i created a dir 'test', cd-ed to it as root, removed it from another tty, and su-ed to a normal user. Sure enough, there's the error. Even if it's removed and remade from the other tty before su-ing, it still gives the error.
