How to set the windows path in Windows 7

October 21, 2009 · 1 min read

Goal

Setting the windows command path in Windows 7.

Additional information

Modifying the path statement will enable an MS-DOS window opened in Microsoft Windows as well as older programs to locate files that may be required to run the program.

In the old MS-DOS environment we used the PATH= command, located in the autoexec.bat file. Additional information about the MS-DOS path command that is still usable in Windows 2000 and Windows XP can be found on our path command page, additional information about the MS-DOS command can be found on our set command page.

See our dictionary path definition for additional information about this term and related definitions.

Answer

The path is now managed by Windows 7 and not the autoexec.bat or autoexec.nt files. To change the system environment variables, follow the below steps.

  1. From the desktop, right-click My Computer and click Properties.

  2. In the System Properties window, click on the Advanced tab.

  3. In the Advanced section, click the Environment Variables button.

  4. Finally, in the Environment Variables window (as shown below), highlight the Path variable in the Systems Variable section and click the Edit button. Add or modify the path lines with the paths you wish the computer to access. Each different directory is separated with a semicolon as shown below:

    C:\Program Files;C:\Winnt;C:\Winnt\System32

Windows environment variables Path setting

New on Geeks with Blogs

  • We Won The One Award I Actually Care About

    Full Scale made the Inc. 5000 for the fifth year straight, the 12th listing across my three companies. Here is why the one award you cannot buy is worth stopping for.

  • Your Customers Build the Features Now

    I let a tool I liked sit dead for a year rather than build the features I wanted. An MCP server meant I never had to, and your customers can do the same to your product.

  • Get the Size of a Directory in Linux the Easy Way

    du -sh for the quick answer, ncdu for the cleanup, df for the disk itself: every command for checking directory size in Linux, plus why du and df never agree.

  • Vim Search and Replace: The Ultimate Guide

    One :%s command replaces every match in a file before a find dialog would even open. The Vim substitute patterns worth the muscle memory: flags, ranges, capture groups, and multi-file edits.