pwd is a great command but its a bad idea to use it everywhere. I learned it the hard way 😩.

I used it inside .zshrc just because I was too lazy to write /home/ishan . You might be wondering I could have just written ~/ instead. As I mentioned earlier pwd is a great command 🤣. Also, I saw that in a tutorial somewhere.

export PATH = “`pwd`/path-to-some/bin:$PATH”

By now you have already guessed what I was up to. Yes, I added some binary to the system path which is located inside my home directory. Okay, but What was the problem with that?

There won’t be any problem if the terminal is spawned from the home directory as pwd resolves to /home/ishan . Yayy it works. But the problem arises when the terminal is spawned form the integrated terminal from IDE. In my case VS Code.

I guess you have already noticed that the VS Code spawns the terminal and you will already be in the project root dir . The integrated terminal will look something like this.

So, when .zshrc is sourced,pwd command resolves to /home/ishan/some-project so the above export PATH command won’t find the binary file. So when I try to run the command it won’t work because the binary file is located inside /home/ishan/path-to-some/bin but the terminal is searching for binary at /home/ishan/some-project/path-to-some/bin .