CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellrelative-pathpwd
J. Doe
J. Doe

Reputation: 1317

What's the difference between "$pwd" and "./"?

As far as I can see using $pwd and using ./ in PowerShell gives the same result.

Are they the same or is there a difference?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 5511

Answers (2)

Joey
Joey

Reputation: 354734

$PWD and Get-Location (alias: pwd) give you an absolute path, . is a relative path. This can be important when storing a path to re-use later (e.g. in a different location), where . will always be relative to the current location.

Upvotes: 5

Mark Wragg
Mark Wragg

Reputation: 23395

$pwd is an automatic variable. Its name stands for "present working directory" and it should always contain the current working path.

You can use just "." or ".\" as a path parameter to represent the current location, but you can't set a variable to .\ and have it then contain the current path, so in this regard they are different.

As an example if you were writing some script logic that needed to check the current working directory you would need to use $pwd vs .\. For example:

if ($pwd -eq 'c:\some\path') { }

Would work. However:

if (. -eq 'c:\some\path') { }

Would not.

Upvotes: 10

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