this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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isn't it just 'present working directory'?
It absolutely can be either and is not so clear cut as responders are claiming.
Weather its 'print working directory' or 'present working directory' depends on the source you ask, and ultimately they have the same meaning so it really doesn't matter which you use.
Whenever pwd is used as a variable, 'present' is more logical than 'print'.
https://qmacro.org/blog/posts/2020/11/08/the-myriad-meanings-of-pwd-in-unix-systems/
No. “Print working directory” is the command to print (display) the “cwd” (current working directory).
I find it weird when you get "pwd" as a variable
Kinda yeah, but I think that just comes from storing the output of the PWD command.
The system call that returns that value is called getcwd().
You "print" to standard output, which is the terminal.
Unless you're old-school and using a teletype as your terminal and actually printing it.
It's 'print current directory' in the source code:
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/42c4578b49afaf3dc8de884262f34e4a19066860/src/pwd.c#L1
This is what it is at least in my head
In my head too. We can share though.
That's what I've always known it as
I mean it’s basically the same thing but the command itself means “print”; it’s a damn old command and it probably predates using screens for terminals (used to be printers); which is why all the parts of Linux (ugh, and GNU of course) that came from Unix ideas came from that age.
You literally sat in front of a typewriter that would respond to you. Wild.
Welp, I always thought path-to-working-directory like to get the full path