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The man page is ambiguous, two words beginning with p appear in the description. I personally trust the Multics etymology. The original developers of UNIX had
by tovej 6y ago
The man page is ambiguous, two words beginning with p appear in the description.
I personally trust the Multics etymology. The original developers of UNIX had worked on Multics after all.
"pathname of working directory" is redundant, as is "process' working directory".
- croes 6y agoPathname of working directory isn't redunant. There are multiple attributes of the working directory like creation time, name, pathname, etc. Pathname is just one of them.
- tovej 6y agoIt is more specific to say "pathname of the working directory", you are right about that. What I meant was: It is redundant in the sense that the pathname is the identifier of the working directory, and if I ask someone to identify something I will receive in answer an identifier. I.e. If I were to ask a user at their computer "what is the current working directory?" and "what is the pathname of the current working directory?" I will get the same answer.
- lovelyviking 6y agoPathname there is the ONLY really useful word there, as it defines functionality exactly and filters out other meanings!
- OskarS 6y agoYeah, the Multics thing seems pretty definitive for me, it's clearly "print working directory". It also makes sense in context with the other basic UNIX commands: they're almost all actions or active verb phrases in some form. "Change directory", "list files, "touch", "concatenate", etc. It makes sense, because they're all programs you run that does stuff, they're not variables you read. So "pwd" as the active "print working directory" makes a lot more sense than the noun phrase "pathname of working directory", which sounds much more like a variable name, not a command name.