How to Find Out Your Directory With the pwd Command

One of the most important commands you will learn when using the Linux command line is the pwd command which stands for print working directory.

This guide will show you how to use the pwd command and will show you the physical path to the directory you are working in and the logical directory you are working in.

How to Find Out Which Linux Directory You Are Currently In

To find out which directory you are currently in run the following command:

pwd

The output for the pwd command will be something like this:

/home/gary

As you move around the system the working directory will change to reflect your current position within the file system.

For example, if you use the cd command to navigate to the documents folder the pwd command will display the following:

/home/gary/documents

What Does pwd Show When You Navigate to a Symbolically Linked Folder

For this part, we will set up a little scenario to explain the situation.

Imagine you have a folder structure as follows:

home
- gary
  - documents
    - folder1
    - folder2

Now imagine you created a symbolic link to folder 2 as follows:

ln -s /home/gary/documents/folder1 /home/gary/documents/accounts

The folder tree would now look like this:

home
- gary
  - documents
    - folder1
    - folder2
    - accounts

The ls command shows the files and folders within a particular location:

ls -lt

If I ran the above command against my documents folder I would see that for accounts it would show something like this:

accounts -> folder2

Symbolic links basically point to another location within the file system.

Now imagine that you are in the documents folder and you used the cd command to move into the accounts folder.

What do you think the output of pwd will be?

If you guessed that it would show /home/gary/documents/accounts then you would be correct but if you ran the ls command against the accounts folder it is showing you the files within the folder2 folder.

Look at the following command:

pwd -P

When you run the above command within a symbolically linked folder you will see the physical location which in our case is /home/gary/documents/folder2.

To see the logical folder you can use the following command:

pwd -L

This would in my case show the same as pwd on its own which is /home/gary/documents/accounts.

Depending on how pwd is compiled and set up on your system the pwd command may default to the physical path or may default to the logical path.

Therefore it is a good habit to use the -P or -L switch (depending on which behavior you wish to see).

Using the $PWD Variable

You can view the current working directory by displaying the value of the $PWD variable. Simply use the following command:

echo $PWD

Display the Previous Working Directory

If you want to view the previous working directory you can run the following command:

echo $OLDPWD

This will display the directory you were in before you moved to the current directory.

Multiple Occurrences of pwd

As mentioned earlier pwd may behave differently based on how it is setup.

A good example of this is within Kubuntu Linux.

The shell version of pwd which is used when you run pwd shows the logical working directory when you are within a symbolically linked folder.

However, if you run the following command you will see that it shows the physical working directory when you are within a symbolically linked folder.

/usr/bin/pwd

This is obviously not very helpful because you are essentially running the same command but you are having the reverse result when run in a default mode.

As mentioned earlier you probably want to get into the habit of using the -P and -L script.