If each off-diagonal entry and the sum of each row of a diagonally dominant
M-matrix are known to certain relative accuracy, then its smallest eigenva
lue and the entries of its inverse are known to the same order relative acc
uracy independent of any condition numbers. In this paper, we devise algori
thms that compute these quantities with relative errors in the magnitude of
the machine precision. Rounding error analysis and numerical examples are
presented to demonstrate the numerical behaviour of the algorithms.