Mail bug

[William L. Sebok]

Actually the pwd error message is usually caused by being in a directory whose
path from the root is not world readable (for example, a subdirectory of a
private correspondence directory).  pwd tries to reconstruct your full
directory name my starting at the root and working downward.  In mail or
in inews pwd is executed by a program setuid to a uid other than root.  Then
pwd just does not have the privileges to do its job properly.  We solved it
here by making pwd a suid to root program.  I haven't been able to think of
any security holes this would cause.
-- 
Bill Sebok			Princeton University, Astrophysics
{allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,kpno,princeton}!astrovax!wls