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In bash if you cd to // your pwd will be //, but if you cd to / or ///+ your pwd will be /. Is there a reason for this or is it just a weird bug?

I have tried this in osx and ubuntu.

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2 Answers 2

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From the Bash FAQ:

E10) Why does `cd //' leave $PWD as `//'?

POSIX.2, in its description of `cd', says that three or more leading slashes may be replaced with a single slash when canonicalizing the current working directory.

This is, I presume, for historical compatibility. Certain versions of Unix, and early network file systems, used paths of the form //hostname/path to access `path' on server `hostname'.

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  • cool I though it was a bug... :)
    – Johan
    Jun 22, 2010 at 6:11
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    Note Windows still uses // for network paths, so this may be a SMB compatibility thing too.
    – Fake Name
    Jun 22, 2010 at 6:53
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    Technically, Windows uses \\ for UNC paths. Jun 22, 2010 at 7:13
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Though the answer was correct on the data it gave, it didn't quite answer the question asked.

The shell is normalizing the path. It does:

  • change any part1/part2/.. components to part1/
  • change any //+ components to /

You can verify this with strace, which will see what is actually passed into the syscall

strace -o /tmp/strace.out bash -c "cd ///tmp"
grep chdir /tmp/strace.out
# will give chdir("/tmp")

strace -o /tmp/strace.out bash -c "cd ///tmp/../etc"
grep chdir /tmp/strace.out
# will give chdir("/etc")

The shell does the path normalization before it even tells the system to change the dir

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