Question

i created a soft link from my home folder to /etc/ by using

"ln -s /etc/ foo"

then i changed directory to foo

"cd foo"

now i executed the following two commands

"pwd" and "/bin/pwd"

Both gave me different outputs.

The output of “pwd” was /home/myhome/foo and of “/bin/pwd” was /etc.
I am not able to understand the difference in the outputs although both commands are the same.

Answer 1

Possibly a bit oversimplified, but the bash builtin pwd tracks cd commands, so when you cd through a symbolic link, it remembers that. On the other hand, /bin/pwd walks the directory tree back to the root, and, as such, has no idea what symbolic links you might have walked through to get where you are.