How to get a variable to have the current dir path?

Question

I have a really simple function in bash script that tells me the current directory. However it gives the error bash: =/home/users/abc: No such file or directory $currentdir is empty.

Why is this happening? I also tried

$currentdir=`pwd` 

and that didn't work too.

This is a similar question Bash: current directory variable and I tried this but it didn't solve my problem.

xpwd() {
    $currentdir=$(pwd)
    echo "current dir is $currentdir"
}

Solution

When you want to set a variable, you don't use the $:

currentdir=`pwd`

The $ is for when you want to do a variable substitution.

Comments

[Benjamin W.]

No mention of how a) $() is preferable and b) there is an environment variable $PWD making the assignment kind of useless anyway?

[user2357112]

@BenjaminW.: Thanks for telling me about $PWD; I wasn't aware of it. As for $(), I probably should have used that.