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I was going to say "what is the advantage of using the PWD
variable?", but, thinking about it three times, I found that
it gives you what the user typed in the last cd(1),
independent of symbolic links. So even though you wrote what
it does, and how it differs from getcwd, its not at all
obvious that this is a good thing (even though I now agree
it is a good thing)

Would you like to work on a patch? A pure Python
implementation sounds reasonable, if your code is what glibc
does as well. It seems to me that the documentation patch is
really crucial here, or else users will wonder "what the
heck...".