PWD(1) General Commands Manual PWD(1)

pwd — return working directory name

pwd [-LP]

The pwd utility prints the absolute pathname of the current working directory to the standard output.

The options are as follows:

If the PWD environment variable is an absolute pathname that references the current directory and doesn't contain path components of "." or "..", then PWD is printed as the name of the current directory. Otherwise, act as if the -P option was given.
Print the physical path to the current working directory, with symbolic links in the path resolved.

The -L and -P options override each other and the command's actions are determined by the last one specified. The default if no options are given is -P.

For an explanation of the directory hierarchy, see hier(7).

The presumptive logical path to the current working directory.

The pwd utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

ksh(1), getcwd(3), hier(7)

The pwd utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”) specification, except the standard says the default if no options are given should be to behave as if -L had been specified.

An pwd utility appeared in Version 5 AT&T UNIX. Support for the -L option was added in OpenBSD 5.6.

pwd also exists as a built-in to ksh(1), which may have a different default behavior.

OpenBSD 7.8 May 28, 2014 PWD(1)