In Unix-like and some other operating systems, the pwd command (print working directory)[1][2][3][4][5] writes the full pathname of the current working directory to the standard output.[6][7][8][9][10]
The command is a shell builtin in most Unix shells such as Bourne shell, ash, bash, ksh, and zsh. It can be implemented easily with the POSIX C functions getcwd() or getwd().
The equivalent on DOS (COMMAND.COM
) and Microsoft Windows (cmd.exe) is the "cd" command with no arguments. Windows PowerShell provides the equivalent "Get-Location" cmdlet with the standard aliases "gl" and "pwd". The OpenVMS equivalent is "show default".
Example
If the following is input into a terminal:
$ pwd
/home/foobar
and the computer prints out /home/foobar, that means that the directory the user is currently in is /home/foobar. In the following example, the user is located in the directory /usr/local/bin, uses the command pwd, uses the command cd .. to move back to the parent directory and then uses pwd again:
$ pwd
/usr/local/bin
$ cd ..
$ pwd
/usr/local
See also
- Breadcrumb (navigation), an alternative way of displaying the work directory
- List of Unix programs
- pushd and popd
References
- ^ [1], UNIX TIME-SHARING SYSTEM: UNIX PROGRAMMER’S MANUAL Seventh Edition, Volume 1 (January, 1979) by Bell labs, Page 142
- ^ [2], Minux MAN page
- ^ [3], Linux MAN page
- ^ [4], GNU Coreutils MAN page
- ^ [5], Bell Labs Plan 9 MAN page
- ^ [6], POSIX Standard (IEEE Std 1003.1) MAN page
- ^ [7], DEC OSF/1 MAN page
- ^ [8], Apple OS X MAN page
- ^ [9], OpenBSD MAN page
- ^ [10], OpenSolaris MAN page
|