The pwd command

The pwd Bash builtin prints the current working directory for the script to the standard output:

$ pwd
/home/bashuser

The working directory for the shell refers to the directory from which all relative paths are based, even if they have multiple levels of directories in them:

$ pwd
/home/bashuser/docs
$ ls important/doc1.txt
important/doc1.txt
$ ls doc2.txt
doc2.txt
$ ls nonexistent
ls: cannot access 'nonexistent': No such file or directory

Any path that starts with a forward slash – a leading slash – is instead an absolute path, and resolves independently of the current directory:

$ ls /home/bashuser/important/doc1.txt
/home/bashuser/important/doc1.txt
$ ls /home/bashuser/doc2.txt
/home/bashuser/doc2.txt