Newbie rpmbuild question: change directory error

[Raman Gupta <rocketraman fastmail fm>]

Hello, I am running Fedora Core 4. I have followed the directions at [1]
in order to get a non-root build tree setup with the appropriate macros,
dir structure, etc.

I am now attempting to build the msttcorefonts RPM (spec file at [2]).
However, any lines that involve "cd <somedir>" seem to fail during building:

$ rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-1.3-4.spec
Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /home/raman/rpmbuild/tmp/rpm-tmp.28761
+ umask 022
+ cd /home/raman/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ rm -rf msttcorefonts
+ mkdir msttcorefonts
+ cd msttcorefonts
/home/raman/rpmbuild/tmp/rpm-tmp.28761: line 24: cd: msttcorefonts: No
such file or directory
error: Bad exit status from /home/raman/rpmbuild/tmp/rpm-tmp.28761 (%prep)


RPM build errors:
    Bad exit status from /home/raman/rpmbuild/tmp/rpm-tmp.28761 (%prep)


Looking in the /home/raman/rpmbuild/BUILD directory, the mkdir was
successful and the msttcorefonts directory does indeed exist. However,
the cd for some reason fails with "No such file or directory".

It works fine if I edit the spec file and change all lines involving cd,
and prefix a `pwd`/ before them e.g.

cd %{name}

change to

cd `pwd`/%{name}

It also works fine without changing the spec file when building as the
root user. This error doesn't seem to be specific to msttcorefonts. This
has also happened to me in the past when building other RPMs as a
non-root user (e.g. the JPackage Java RPMs).

Can anyone tell me why this is happening and how I can fix it? I don't
want to continue to build RPMs as root.

Cheers,
Raman


[1]http://www.rpm.org/hintskinks/buildtree/rpmbuild-nonroot/README
[2]http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/msttcorefonts-1.3-4.spec?download