Original author(s) | AT&T Bell Laboratories |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Various open-source and commercial developers |
Initial release | June 1974 |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Multics, Unix, Unix-like, V, Plan 9, Inferno, SpartaDOS X, PANOS, Windows CE, KolibriOS |
Platform | Cross-platform |
Type | Command |
License |
coreutils:
GPLv3+ Plan 9: MIT License |
In
Unix-like and some other
operating systems, the pwd
command (print working directory)
[1]
[2]
[3] writes the full
pathname of the current
working directory to the
standard output.
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
Multics had a pwd
command (which was a short name of the print_wdir
command)
[11] from which the Unix pwd command originated.
[12] 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()
.
It is also available in the operating systems
SpartaDOS X,
[13]
PANOS,
[14] and
KolibriOS.
[15] 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
.
On
Windows CE 5.0, the cmd.exe
Command Processor Shell includes the pwd
command.
[16]
pwd
as found on Unix systems is part of the
X/Open Portability Guide since issue 2 of 1987. It was inherited into the first version of POSIX.1 and the
Single Unix Specification.
[17] It appeared in
Version 5 Unix.
[18] The version of pwd
bundled in
GNU
coreutils was written by Jim Meyering.
[19]
The
numerical computing environments
MATLAB and
GNU Octave include a pwd
function with similar functionality.
[20]
[21] The
OpenVMS equivalent is show default
.
Command |
Explanation |
---|---|
pwd |
Display the current working directory. Example: /home/foobar |
pwd -P |
Display the current working directory physical path - without symbolic link name, if any. Example: If standing in a dir /home/symlinked, that is a symlink to /home/realdir, this would show /home/realdir |
pwd -L |
Display the current working directory logical path - with symbolic link name, if any. Example: If standing in a dir /home/symlinked, that is a symlink to /home/realdir, this would show /home/symlinked |
Note: POSIX requires that the default behavior be as if the -L
switch were provided.
POSIX shells set the following environment variables while using the cd command: [22]
pushd
and popd