Shell – What does the ‘.’ dot mean as a working directory

directorypwdshellzsh

I'm not referring to the . you see in shell commands or in the output of ls -a.

I just ran an install script for a vpn application, and after the command exited, my terminal prompt was in the . directory.

This is my pwd output:

➜ pwd
.

I've never seen anything like this. Anyone know what this is?

Best Answer

That can happen when the current working directory has been deleted:

$ zsh -c 'mkdir dir; cd dir; rmdir $PWD; cd .; pwd; readlink /proc/self/cwd; command pwd'
.
/home/chazelas/dir (deleted)
pwd: couldn't find directory entry in ‘..’ with matching i-node

(the cd . causes zsh to double-check what its current directory is, and it reverts to . (the only possible valid path to the current working directory) when getcwd() returns with an error)

Related Solutions

Shell – How to output “temporarily” to the shell, like zsh tab completion does

On any system that uses terminfo:

printf "The password is %s " "swordfish"
read -r line
tput cuu1; tput el

Press Enter to erase the password and quit, or Ctrl+C to quit immediately. If your system uses termcap, use tput up; tput ce. This code assumes that the cursor is still on the line with the password by the time the user pressed Enter.

Shell – What does “cd &” mean

By writing the & on the end of the command line, you are instructing your shell to take the command pipeline (in this case a single command) and run it in a sub-shell in the background (not waiting for a result). cd is a bash builtin, but that is not important here. It will not affect your "parent" shell in any way, so your working directory will not be changed.

[1] 7519

This line is reporting that there is a job running in the background identified by number 1 and the process ID is 7519. A similar thing will be printed if you run e.g. vim and then press Ctrl+Z to suspend it. When the process finishes, the shell won't report that until the next processing cycle (e.g. just hit Return once again) and then it will print the update listing jobs finished.

For further details please read man bash and the section JOB CONTROL.

For reference, the question Why does exit & not work? bears some similarity.

Best Answer

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Shell – What does “cd &” mean

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