pwdx returning gibberish

Question

pwdx is supposed to print out the current working directory of a process given a process id.

Normally this looks something like:

$ sudo pwdx 1
1: /

$ pwdx $$
5251: /home/foo

One one machine I have it always returns the same gibberish string

$ pwdx 1
1: H?l$?L?|$?H?-

$ pwdx 24535
24535: H?l$?L?|$?H?-

$ pwdx $$
24351: H?l$?L?|$?H?-

Answer 1

Use the equivalent:

readlink -f /proc/PID/cwd

Answer 2

Intresting. pwdx is really simple, code-wise; it just resolve the 'cwd' symlink target in /prod/pid

What do you get from this?

ls -l /proc/$$/cwd

Also, what distribution/architecture are you on? Default character set? Here's a link to the source if you want to try building your own. You shouldn't need to do anything outside of "make".

http://procps.sourceforge.net/