Current working directory Poco error

Problem

I was trying to build the Poco library when I got this error:

/home/blah/someplace/poco-poco-1.4.6p4-release/build/rules/global:62: *** Current working directory not under $PROJECT_BASE.  Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory

The same code had built successfully on another computer, so I knew there was nothing wrong.

Solution

Turns out that this error is actually caused if the path where you have unzipped Poco has a symlink in it. The someplace directory above was actually a symbolic link. Once I copied Poco to a path which had no symlink, it compiled fine.