oddity regarding execution

[Kirk Bailey]

I am using FreeBSD and sendmail to work on the internet. Recently I wrote a program to 
process a incoming email and append it to a file in it's own directory. I have a 
complete email in a file in the directory for testing, and I fired it up from the 
command line prompt using input redirection to draw input from the file; it worked fine. 
So I created an alias pointed at it, and fired off a test message.

Well, when the alias fed the message to it, it barked. 'unknown mailer error 1' says the 
log. Ran it with the sample file, worked fine; even modified the testcase a little, 
still fine. Hmmmm... So I added a line to the script, so it would open a file and write 
it's current path, and very carefully detailed EXACTLY where this file lived, having a 
suspicion. BARK! Although it still barked like a dog, it gave me my confirmation; when 
executed by an alias, it thinks the cwd is '/'!!! I modified the script to point EXACTLY 
to the location of the recipient file of the data, and all was now well, either way.

HHMMMMMMMMMMMMM..... is this a freebsd quriosity, a sendmail quriosity, or what all? And 
is there anything I can do so the cwd will be the dir the script is living in?


-- 

end

Cheers!
         Kirk D Bailey
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