in reply to current working dir is location of script?

Note that you will see different behavior if you use the "chdir" function within perl -- when the perl script does a "chdir" to some other path, this does NOT alter the current value of $ENV{PWD} -- the Cwd module will provide the truth in this case, as will the use of `pwd`, and $ENV{PWD} will be wrong still refer to the path where you were when you started the script.