_getcwd.txt

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2203159/is-there-a-c-equivalent-to-getcwd


std::string's constructor can safely take a char* as a parameter. Surprisingly there's a windows version too.



Edit: actually it's a little more complicated:



std::string get_working_path()
{
   char temp[MAXPATHLEN];
   return ( getcwd(temp, sizeof(temp)) ? std::string( temp ) : std::string("") );
}



Memory is no problem -- temp is a stack based buffer, and the 
std::string constructor does a copy. Probably you could do it in one go,
 but I don't think the standard would guarantee that.



About memory allocation, via POSIX:




  The getcwd() function shall place an absolute pathname of the 
current working directory in the array pointed to by buf, and return 
buf. The pathname copied to the array shall contain no 
components that are symbolic links. The size argument is the size in 
bytes of the character array pointed to by the buf argument. If buf is a
 null pointer, the behavior of getcwd() is unspecified.