In Unix-like and some other operating systems, the pwd
command (print working directory) writes the full pathname of the current working directory to the standard output.
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
.
If the following is input into a terminal:
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: