The Cwd perl5 module contains various functions to return the string
of the current working directory. The POSIX API only contains
getcwd(), some provide also getwd() - ignored in perl, and the
glibc also provides get_current_dir_name() and supports a NULL
argument for getcwd(char *buf, size_t size). The Cwd module adds
cwd, getcwd, getdcwd for Windows with a drive letter, fastcwd,
fastgetcwd.
symlinks
The simplify the explanation of the various variants, which in theory
should all return the same string, consider symlinks. If realpath
"." expands to something else than your $PWD, then the current
directory is behind a symlink. This is a big problem for rmtree, as
chdir’ing into a directory which is a symlink would lead to a
situation, where you cannot step out to the previous directory again,
and rmtree would continue deleting something else. You might chdir
out of a directory that you can’t chdir back into.
So to summarize the fastcwd variants, they could return a directory which contains a symlink, while getcwd should always resolve all symlinks. In practice fastcwd should be usable for most cases and does return the logically correct directory, so users are not surprised by returning different pathnames for the same directory. But when you traverse a tree, resolving symlinks should be done to avoid troubles.
cwd() is normally implemented as fastcwd(), just very slow. E.g. by
shelling out to pwd. You really should never use cwd, only fastcwd
or getcwd, depending on your use case.
long pathnames
On POSIX system the maximal length of a path is specified with
_POSIX_PATH_MAX or PATH_MAX, which is usually 4096. Older systems
have sometimes limits like 256, newer systems like Windows NT via
certain APIs like 32K. But the actual limitation is really based on
the filesystem, see https://eklitzke.org/path-max-is-tricky. Many
filesystems do support much longer pathnames than just 4096. On POSIX
you could use pathconf to get the actual limit for this mountpoint,
or you could do it like in cperl: Use the correct API
(get_current_dir_name, getcwd(NULL, 0)), or check with growing
path buffers until ENAMETOOLONG is not returned anymore.
In cperl all the Cwd functions can handle overlong pathnames for some years already, perl5 cannot.
security
Attacks on bugs and limitations on pathname API’s are quite common and easy to use. With the right symlink in user space or overlong pathnames you can trick the system into race attacks. See e.g. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=487319 or https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-6512 on the File::Path module, which creates paths and removes trees.
When your system getcwd function does not resolve symlinks, i.e. it is just fastcwd, rmtree is still vulnerable to symlink attacks. E.g. as outlined in https://github.com/jkeenan/File-Path/pull/7, which the maintainer is unwilling to fix. Also note that the File::Path API became a mess recently. On yet unsupported arguments, like uid, group or owner on Windows, the latest version dies, the previous versions returned an error. As if Windows would not support such metadata. In fact Windows support much more metadata than traditional POSIX filesystems, such as ACLs.
This fastcwd problem can e.g. be seen with CPAN, when ~/.cpan/build
resolves to something else. Then the tmp-$$ directory cannot be
deleted, and CPAN aborts. Or with DBD::File, when your virtual tables
are returned with a “./” prefix when using fastcwd and not getcwd.
But there are so many security problems in perl5, that you really should not use perl5 in production with public access. Only cperl, which does have those kind of bugs fixed. And many more.