I was about to point out that you are likely to have an environment variable on hand for this -- e.g. with a bash shell, I can use "$ENV{PWD}" -- but there are some problems with this:

• The name of the %ENV element may vary depending on what shell you use.
• Perl's "chdir" function does NOT update %ENV.

It turns out that jkahn's advice to "use Cwd;" is absolutely right -- and for my own sake, I'm glad to have learned how right it is:

cd /home/graff
perl -e 'use Cwd;
 $,=" ";  print $ENV{PWD},getcwd,$/;
 chdir "/tmp"; print $ENV{PWD},getcwd,$/;'
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As the output shown below makes clear, Cwd::getcwd always returns the true current directory:

/home/graff /home/graff 
/home/graff /tmp
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