Determining Your Current Directory with pwd

Once you start looking through directories, it is easy to get lost or forget the name of your current directory. By default, bash shows just your current directory, not the entire path.

To determine the exact location of your current directory within the file system, go to a shell prompt and type the command pwd.

You should see something like:

/home/sam

This tells you that you are in the user sam's directory, which is in the /home directory.

The command pwd stands for print working directory. When you typed pwd, you asked your Linux system to display your current location. Your system responded by printing the name of the current directory in the terminal window, also known as the standard output.

You will find that using pwd is very helpful as you learn to navigate your new Linux system.