Sometimes you may need to get current working directory in shell script. You can easily do this using pwd command or PWD environment variable. In this article, we will look at how to get current directory in shell script using these two methods.
How to Get Current Directory in Shell Script
You can use built-in shell command pwd or shell variable $PWD to get current working directory as per your requirement. We will look at how to use both of them below.
Here is an example of how to use them in shell terminal.
$ pwd /home/ubuntu $ echo $PWD /home/ubuntu
Now we will create a shell script to demonstrate the above two ways to get current directory.
1. Create Shell Script
Open terminal and run the following command to create a blank shell script.
$ sudo vi current_dir.sh
2. Get Current Directory
Add the following lines to your Shell Script.
!/bin/sh echo "current directory using pwd command" echo $(pwd) echo "current directory using PWD variable" echo $PWD echo "previous working directory using OLDPWD variable" echo $OLDPWD
Save and close the file. In the above code, we specify shell script execution environment. Then we display current path using pwd command. Next, we display present working directory using PWD shell variable. Finally, we display the previous working directory using OLDPWD shell variable.
3. Make Shell Script Executabe
Run the following command to make it executable.
$ sudo chmod +x current_dir.sh
4. Run shell script
Run the shell script to verify output
$ ./current_dir.sh current directory using pwd command /home/ubuntu current directory using PWD variable /home/ubuntu previous working directory using OLDPWD variable /etc/data
You may also store the result of either of these commands in a variable and append strings to get more path values. Here is an example
#!/bin/sh path =$PWD echo $PWD #/home/ubuntu subpath="/data" new_path = $path$subpath #/home/ubuntu/data echo $new_path #/home/ubuntu/data
In this article, we have learnt how to get current working directory in shell script using pwd command as well as using PWD environment variable. You may use either of them depending on your requirement. They both give same result. You may also append other strings to them to construct new path values.
Also read:
How to Get Current Directory in Python
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Sreeram has more than 10 years of experience in web development, Python, Linux, SQL and database programming.