Shell-init error retrieving current directory [Fix]

Here’s an error reported by one of our regular reader Anu. She says, cluster-fork  w command ends up with an error “shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory“.

Here’s the complete snapshot of the error:

$cluster-fork w
compute-0-0: shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory
down
compute-0-1: shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory

shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory

Solution:

This error mostly occurs when the directory in which this command was executed does not exist anymore. For example, assume that you had changed directory to 'test' and issued cluster-fork command. During the execution of cluster-fork, if the directory test was removed (may be a program that regularly cleans disk space or mistakenly deleted from a different terminal), then 'getcwd' will not be able to return the current working directory. Hence, cluster-fork will return an error “getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory”.

To fix this error, one has to just get out of that non-existent directory. Usually by issuing 'cd' command to get to the home directory and execute cluster-fork command.