pwd

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() and/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