When csh can't access .

[Chris Torek]

In article <624 at cullvax.UUCP> drw at cullvax.UUCP (Dale Worley) writes:
>It seems that when csh (under Ultrix 1.2, which is a BSD 4.2 variant)
>starts up, if it cannot get any access to the current directory, it
>exits silently.

Yes.  This is a standard C-shell bug.  The C shell believes it must
know the name of the current directory (for, e.g., $cwd), but does
not try hard enough to get it.  It might invoke `pwd' if its own
code fails; or it might just chdir($HOME) or chdir(/) and complain;
but it just exits.

The routine that does this is called getwd(), and is either in the C
shell source or in the C library, or both.  (I cannot be more specific
because our source machine is down with broken CDC 9771 drives.)
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690)
UUCP:	seismo!mimsy!chris	ARPA/CSNet:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu