How to get the PWD

[Satya_6]

Hi,

how do I get the working directory in my c code?

I used `getenv` to get the current work directory, but it is returning NULL.

TIA
satya

[Bruno Vidal]

Hi,
For myself, it works perfectly:

#include
main()
{
printf("%s\n",getenv("PWD"));
}


#cc -o toto toto.c
#./toto
/tmp

What's your code that return NULL ?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

The cleaner way to do this from C is to simply use the getcwd() function. Man 3 getcwd for details.

[Mike Stroyan]

getcwd() and getenv("PWD") may disagree if you cd through a symbolic link. The shell tracks current working directory with the symbolic link name in PWD. The getcwd() function uses a series of ".." steps with readdir and lstat to find the real directory names on the way to up to "/".

% echo $PWD
/home/stroyan
% mkdir real
% ln -s real symbolic
% cd symbolic
% echo $PWD
/home/stroyan/symbolic
% pwd
/home/stroyan/symbolic
% /usr/bin/pwd
/home/stroyan/real