PWD is not seen by my emacs installation

[Patrick Mahan]

Hardware -

   Macbook Pro 14" (Apple M1 Pro)
   Mac OS 13.1 (Ventura)

Emacs -

   Emacs 28.2 (build 1, aarch64-apple-darwin21.1.0, NS appkit-2113.00
Version 12.0.1 (Build 21A559)) of 2022-09-12)

My emacs does not see the current directory, but instead is expecting
everything to be under ~/.  I thought emacs grokked the PWD environment
variable.

>From my shell -

    % echo $PWD
    /Users/mahan/src/PPP/ppp-master/pppd

But inside my .emacs I have -

(setq workingdir (getenv "PWD"))
message "PWD = '%s'" workingdir)

Which results in -

PWD = ’nil’

Unless I open using a Full pathname, it will not open the file correctly.

Suggestions?

Thanks,

Patrick