createrepo fails with os.getcwd

Question

i'm starting to use puppet. i wanted to have my own yum repository to serve puppet server so i issued

 yum install createrepo

no errors reported (cenotos 5.5) after that i issued

createrepo /var/www/html/repository

but i get:

shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/createrepo/genpkgmetadata.py", line 724, in ?
    main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/share/createrepo/genpkgmetadata.py", line 592, in main
    cmds, directories = parseArgs(args)
  File "/usr/share/createrepo/genpkgmetadata.py", line 431, in parseArgs
    cmds['basedir'] = os.getcwd()
 OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

note the folder:

/var/www/html

exists

Answer 1

i found the problem os.getcwd() throws exception because as it turned the directory i was in was deleted by another process. all i needed to do was to change to a valid directory. interesting watson.