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.
Example
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: