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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | ATTRIBUTES | VERSIONS | VERSIONS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | NOTES | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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getcwd(3) Library Functions Manual getcwd(3)
getcwd, getwd, get_current_dir_name - get current working
directory
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <unistd.h>
char *getcwd(size_t size;
char buf[size], size_t size);
char *get_current_dir_name(void);
[[deprecated]] char *getwd(char buf[PATH_MAX]);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see
feature_test_macros(7)):
get_current_dir_name():
_GNU_SOURCE
getwd():
Since glibc 2.12:
(_XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500) && ! (_POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200809L)
|| /* glibc >= 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
|| /* glibc <= 2.19: */ _BSD_SOURCE
Before glibc 2.12:
_BSD_SOURCE || _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500
These functions return a null-terminated string containing an
absolute pathname that is the current working directory of the
calling process. The pathname is returned as the function result
and via the argument buf, if present.
The getcwd() function copies an absolute pathname of the current
working directory to the array pointed to by buf, which is of
length size.
If the length of the absolute pathname of the current working
directory, including the terminating null byte, exceeds size
bytes, NULL is returned, and errno is set to ERANGE; an
application should check for this error, and allocate a larger
buffer if necessary.
As an extension to the POSIX.1-2001 standard, glibc's getcwd()
allocates the buffer dynamically using malloc(3) if buf is NULL.
In this case, the allocated buffer has the length size unless size
is zero, when buf is allocated as big as necessary. The caller
should free(3) the returned buffer.
get_current_dir_name() will malloc(3) an array big enough to hold
the absolute pathname of the current working directory. If the
environment variable PWD is set, and its value is correct, then
that value will be returned. The caller should free(3) the
returned buffer.
getwd() does not malloc(3) any memory. The buf argument should be
a pointer to an array at least PATH_MAX bytes long. If the length
of the absolute pathname of the current working directory,
including the terminating null byte, exceeds PATH_MAX bytes, NULL
is returned, and errno is set to ENAMETOOLONG. (Note that on some
systems, PATH_MAX may not be a compile-time constant; furthermore,
its value may depend on the filesystem, see pathconf(3).) For
portability and security reasons, use of getwd() is deprecated.
On success, these functions return a pointer to a string
containing the pathname of the current working directory. In the
case of getcwd() and getwd() this is the same value as buf.
On failure, these functions return NULL, and errno is set to
indicate the error. The contents of the array pointed to by buf
are undefined on error.
EACCES Permission to read or search a component of the filename
was denied.
EFAULT buf points to a bad address.
EINVAL The size argument is zero and buf is not a null pointer.
EINVAL getwd(): buf is NULL.
ENAMETOOLONG
getwd(): The size of the null-terminated absolute pathname
string exceeds PATH_MAX bytes.
ENOENT The current working directory has been unlinked.
ENOMEM Out of memory.
ERANGE The size argument is less than the length of the absolute
pathname of the working directory, including the
terminating null byte. You need to allocate a bigger array
and try again.
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
attributes(7).
┌──────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────────┐
│ Interface │ Attribute │ Value │
├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────────┤
│ getcwd(), getwd() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────────┤
│ get_current_dir_name() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe env │
└──────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────────┘
POSIX.1-2001 leaves the behavior of getcwd() unspecified if buf is
NULL.
POSIX.1-2001 does not define any errors for getwd().
C library/kernel differences
On Linux, the kernel provides a getcwd() system call, which the
functions described in this page will use if possible. The system
call takes the same arguments as the library function of the same
name, but is limited to returning at most PATH_MAX bytes. (Before
Linux 3.12, the limit on the size of the returned pathname was the
system page size. On many architectures, PATH_MAX and the system
page size are both 4096 bytes, but a few architectures have a
larger page size.) If the length of the pathname of the current
working directory exceeds this limit, then the system call fails
with the error ENAMETOOLONG. In this case, the library functions
fall back to a (slower) alternative implementation that returns
the full pathname.
Following a change in Linux 2.6.36, the pathname returned by the
getcwd() system call will be prefixed with the string
"(unreachable)" if the current directory is not below the root
directory of the current process (e.g., because the process set a
new filesystem root using chroot(2) without changing its current
directory into the new root). Such behavior can also be caused by
an unprivileged user by changing the current directory into
another mount namespace. When dealing with pathnames from
untrusted sources, callers of the functions described in this page
(before glibc 2.27) or the raw getcwd() system call should
consider checking whether the returned pathname starts with '/' or
'(' to avoid misinterpreting an unreachable path as a relative
pathname.
getcwd()
POSIX.1-2008.
get_current_dir_name()
GNU.
getwd()
None.
getcwd()
POSIX.1-2001.
getwd()
POSIX.1-2001, but marked LEGACY. Removed in POSIX.1-2008.
Use getcwd() instead.
Under Linux, these functions make use of the getcwd() system call
(available since Linux 2.1.92). On older systems they would query
/proc/self/cwd. If both system call and proc filesystem are
missing, a generic implementation is called. Only in that case
can these calls fail under Linux with EACCES.
These functions are often used to save the location of the current
working directory for the purpose of returning to it later.
Opening the current directory (".") and calling fchdir(2) to
return is usually a faster and more reliable alternative when
sufficiently many file descriptors are available, especially on
platforms other than Linux.
Since the Linux 2.6.36 change that added "(unreachable)" in the
circumstances described above, the glibc implementation of
getcwd() has failed to conform to POSIX and returned a relative
pathname when the API contract requires an absolute pathname.
With glibc 2.27 onwards this is corrected; calling getcwd() from
such a pathname will now result in failure with ENOENT.
pwd(1), chdir(2), fchdir(2), open(2), unlink(2), free(3),
malloc(3)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-06-28 getcwd(3)
Pages that refer to this page: pwd(1), chdir(2), syscalls(2), realpath(3), core(5)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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