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From: subbarao@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kartik Subbarao)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perl beginner
Message-ID: <azWk8Os5gwrTw@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 29 May 91 12:34:48 GMT
References: <EcEkB=i00VsnE622gr@andrew.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU
Reply-To: subbarao@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kartik Subbarao)
Organization: American Chemical Society
Lines: 34

In article <EcEkB=i00VsnE622gr@andrew.cmu.edu> bobg+@andrew.cmu.edu (Robert Steven Glickstein) writes:
>I'm a Perl beginner, but I'm amazed by how quickly I've picked up the
>language and how quickly I've been able to write really complex
>utilities.  To an experienced C programmer like myself, Perl came very
>naturally and it is now my prototype/utility language of choice.  OK,
>enough hype. :-)
>
>It seems that Perl ought to have a built-in getwd command, but it
>doesn't.  

By "built-in", do you mean that it should getcwd() every time it starts up
and save that as a $something variable? There's really no need to do so, if
you don't care about your current working directory. SOMEONE has to do the
getcwd() call -- you don't get it for free.

Is it the case that the only way to find out the current
>working directory is to do
>
>	$cwd = `/bin/pwd`;
>	chop $cwd;

In the case that your shell sets a CWD or PWD environment variable, then you 
can access it in perl by:

$cwd = $ENV{'CWD'} (or PWD, or whatever).


		-Kartik
--
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