 The pwd command | |
| 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 |
pwd (print working directory) [1] [2] [3] is a shell command that reports the working directory path to standard output. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
Contents
Although often associated with Unix, its predecessor Multics had a pwd command (which was a short name of the print_wdir command [11] ) from which the Unix command originated. [12] The command 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. [13] It appeared in Version 5 Unix. [14] The version bundled in GNU Core Utilities was written by Jim Meyering. [15]
The command is available in other shells and operating systems including SpartaDOS X, [16] PANOS, [17] and KolibriOS. [18] PowerShell provides pwd as an alias for the cmdlet Get-Location. An equivalent command in COMMAND.COM and Command Prompt is the cd command with no arguments. On Windows CE 5.0, cmd.exe includes a pwd command. [19] The OpenVMS equivalent is show default.
The numerical computing environments MATLAB and GNU Octave include a pwd function with similar functionality. [20] [21]
The command is implemented as a shell builtin in many Unix shells including sh, ash, bash, ksh, and zsh. It can be implemented with the POSIX getcwd() or getwd() functions.
