clone fails: Could not get the current working directory

[John Freeman <jfreeman@cs.tamu.edu>]

Howdy,

I'm trying to clone a remote repository.  Here's the background:

- The repository is bare, under Bob's home directory on a remote Sun system.
- Bob has set the group permissions for the repo directory to repogroup.
- I have an account on the remote system that is in repogroup.

I am trying to clone the repo on my home machine, using

 > git clone ssh://john@remote.system.edu/home/bob/path/to/repo

It fails with

remote: fatal: Could not get the current working directory
error: git-upload-pack: git-pack-objects died with error.
fatal: git-upload-pack: aborting due to possible repository corruption 
on the remote side.
remote: aborting due to possible repository corruption on the remote side.
fatal: early EOF
fatal: index-pack failed

Checking the source code, this error is triggered after getcwd() returns 
a null pointer in setup.c:set_work_tree(), which is called at only one 
place, in setup.c:setup_git_directory_gently().

Can anyone provide any insight as to why am I seeing this error?

Thank you,
John