pwd

In Unix-like and some other operating systems, the pwd command (print working directory)^[1][2][3][4] writes the full pathname of the current working directory to the standard output.^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

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. ↑ Minux MAN page
2. ↑ Linux MAN page
3. ↑ GNU Coreutils MAN page
4. ↑ Bell Labs Plan 9 MAN page
5. ↑ POSIX Standard (IEEE Std 1003.1) MAN page
6. ↑ DEC OSF/1 MAN page
7. ↑ Apple OS X MAN page
8. ↑ OpenBSD MAN page
9. ↑ OpenSolaris MAN page