pwd (print working directory) is a shell command that reports the working directory path to standard output.

Although often associated with Unix, its predecessor Multics had a pwd command (which was a short name of the print_wdir command) from which the Unix command originated. 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. It appeared in Version 5 Unix. The version bundled in GNU Core Utilities was written by Jim Meyering.

The command is available in other shells and operating systems including SpartaDOS X, PANOS, and KolibriOS. 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. The OpenVMS equivalent is show default.

The numerical computing environments MATLAB and GNU Octave include a pwd function with similar functionality.

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.

The following examples are based on a typical Unix-based implementation.

With no arguments, the command writes the working directory path to the terminal:

Display the working directory without any symbolic link info. If at a directory /home/symlinked that is a symlink to /home/realdir: