The pwd command and cwd() give different results on my system (bash 4.4.20(1) on Linux).

% cd /tmp
% mkdir foo
% cd foo
% mkdir dir1
% ln -s dir1 sym1
% cd sym1

% echo PWD
/tmp/foo/sym1

% pwd
/tmp/foo/sym1

% perl -MCwd=getcwd -E'say getcwd'
/tmp/foo/dir1

% perl -MCwd=cwd -E'say cwd'
/tmp/foo/dir1

But pwd and PWD sometime give different results too.

UPDATE:The difference is pwd can be instructed to return "logical" and "physical" version, and the logical version still gets information from PWD. Cwd's documentation: "The cwd() is the most natural form for the current architecture. For most systems it is identical to `pwd` (but without the trailing line terminator)." might perhaps be improved by saying: "The cwd() is the most natural form for the current architecture. For most systems it is identical to `pwd -P` (but without the trailing line terminator).

In reply to Re^3: Getting the absolute path of a script, without PWD by perlancar
in thread Getting the shell's version of working directory, without PWD's help by perlancar

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