When I cd through a symlink, why does pwd show the symlink instead of the real path?

Question

I created a soft link (ln -s 1 2) to a directory which is inside the test directory and opened the soft link (cd 2) and displayed the current path using pwd. The displayed path was ~/test/2 and not ~/test/1.

It's different in an OS like Windows, the shortcut brings us to the real directory. I'm little bit confused how this soft link works in Linux. Is it not a shortcut like in Windows? Why is the path not ~/test/1?

 $ mkdir test
 $ cd test
 $ mkdir 1
 $ ln -s 1 2
 $ cd 2
 $ pwd
 /home/dazz/test/2

Answer 1

That is a feature of the shell that remembers how you got to where you are.
If you have realpath installed you can do:

$ realpath 
/home/dazz/test/1

And lacking that if you have python:

$ python -c "import os; print(os.path.realpath('.'))"
/home/dazz/test/1

or readlink (from coreutils):

$ readlink -f .
/home/dazz/test/1

or /bin/pwd (not the shell built-in pwd):

$ /bin/pwd
/home/dazz/test/1

Answer 2

Contrast pwd and /bin/pwd.

pwd, which is a built-in command in many shells, tells you where your shell thinks you are (and hence treats symlinks "soft links" as if they were real directories.

/bin/pwd is an external program that tells you where you really are, if necessary by traversing the filesystem tree up to /. It takes no account of symlinks because those don't exist when traversing upwards through ..

Answer 3

Other answers have covered /bin/pwd vs the shell's builtin pwd.

If you want to follow symlinks in the Windows style you mentioned, use cd -P: it will change the PWD variable accordingly.

If you want to use -P by default, you can add this line to your .bashrc or .zshrc:

set -P

Other shells may vary.