vista rob on 03 Mar 2007 09:14 pm
Changing Your System Path in Windows Vista
One of the things I really like about Vista is the help. So far it has delivered the goods as I get adjusted to the changes from XP. One of the things I didn’t find easily in Windows Vista help was how to change my system path.
A system path is an environment variable and has been around since the DOS days. Back then you wanted to be able to execute certain files from anywhere in your file system. Now-a-days there isn’t much emphasis on maintaining a good system path because people generally create shortcuts directly to the programs they need (or the installation software does it for you). Also most people don’t use the command prompt at this point.
Our local development environment for Podcastinople is pretty complicated. It uses a lot of Ruby on Rails components, ImageMagick, Rmagick, Tortoise SVN and Posgres SQL. I had to get all these installed and set up because of my migration to a clean install of Vista, and one of the steps is a manual change to the system path.
So when Windows Vista Help let me down I searched G for system path windows vista and came up with nothing. A little guessing based on a guide for XP and I was able to find it. There are two ways to do this.
The easy way:
- Click Start and choose Control Panel
- In the Search box on the top right of the window type “system path” (no quotes)
- Click “Edit the system environment variables”
- Begin at step 4 below.
The hard way:
- Click Start and choose Control Panel
- Click System, on the right you’ll see “View basic information about your computer”
- On the left is a list of tasks, the last of which is “Advanced system settings.” Click that.
- The Advanced tab of the System Properties dialog box is shown. Click the Environment Variables button on the bottom right.
- In the lower box titled “System Variables” scroll down to Path and click the Edit button.
- Change your path as need be.
- Restart your system. Vista didn’t pick up the system path environment variable change until I restarted.
I go back and forth between Windows and Unix enough that I find myself typing “ls” the directory listing for Unix/Linux based systems when I meant to type “dir”. To fix this I add a file called ls.bat to a folder that is in my system path that contains the dir command. This saves me a few oops commands on occasion.
on 04 Mar 2007 at 5:51 pm 1.dave said …
A better solution to your ‘ls’ problem would be to install the unix gnu tools for windows:
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
just unzip them in a good place and add the dir to your path
then you get a bunch of other good tools too!
on 04 Mar 2007 at 6:40 pm 2.Rob said …
Hey, that looks handy.
*installs*
Doh. Doesn’t look like this thing likes Vista very much.
on 04 Apr 2007 at 3:57 am 3.Andrew said …
GnuWin32 is similar, but still maintained. Find it at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
on 04 Apr 2007 at 10:24 am 4.rob said …
Cool, Andrew. I’ll check it out. Thanks.
on 06 Jul 2007 at 1:32 pm 5.Brian said …
Thanks for the helpful instructions. I was looking all over trying to find out where Vista hid the Environment variables!
on 16 Oct 2007 at 7:43 am 6.stephen said …
Gee, I spent hours and hours trying to change my system path, and seconds doing it from your instructions. Thanks!
on 23 Oct 2007 at 7:32 am 7.Abhishek Padmanabh said …
Thanks! It saved me quite sometime. Is pretty hard to find it… help does not help much either…
on 27 Oct 2007 at 10:22 am 8.John Xie said …
A faster way (if you are using classic taskbar and have the computer icon on your desktop) is to right click computer icon, choose property, then click on advanced system settings, then click on environment variables.
Also, you don’t have to reboot. The path changes is taken place immediately, you can verify this by type “set” in the command prompt and look at the “path=..” string.
on 11 Nov 2007 at 8:20 am 9.Daniel Brockman said …
Thank you for the info on how to change the macrosuck environment variable. i also struggled for quite a while till i found your wisdom.
I have used cygwin unix for many years on my windows pcs.
http://www.cygwin.com/
Not only do you get ls and other basic unix commands, but you also get perl, ruby, apache, gcc and a lot of other fine unix stuff.
Install cygwin, put the cygwin /usr/bin dir on your path (usually C:\cygwin\bin unless you begin tinkering with it).
Caveat: a few years ago, an object oriented zealot (OOZ) improved bash and sh (same executable, in truth) so they no longer work without specified options. So, where you formerly would write
#! /usr/bin/sh
or
#! /usr/bin/bash
you now will write
#! /usr/bin/sh -o igncr
or
#! /usr/bin/bash -o igncr
db
on 31 Dec 2007 at 11:31 pm 10.Fred Zarguna said …
You do not need to re-boot, provided the process you want to have the new path available to is started *AFTER* the change in environment variables.
For the desktop, you could close all instances of explorer in the task manager, then restart explorer.exe to open a fresh desktop. For a command prompt, just open one–it should reflect the altered path.
on 10 Jan 2008 at 2:14 am 11.Marius B said …
Thanks for the quick tip. I was very useful for me too!
on 25 Jan 2008 at 2:12 pm 12.Eric said …
You don’t need to reboot for the change to take effect. However, only command windows opened *after* the change will see it. If you had a command window open before the change, it won’t see subsequent changes to the environment variables made outside of itself.
on 01 Jul 2008 at 3:18 pm 13.sandhya said …
Excellent help…..!
on 22 Jul 2008 at 12:29 pm 14.Robert said …
my Windows don’t have PATH….
why!!?
on 29 Jul 2008 at 9:34 pm 15.Don said …
Googled ‘Windows Vista PATH variable’ after struggling through Vista help and came immediately here. Thanks for the information and for taking the time to post.
on 09 Aug 2008 at 4:34 pm 16.Kdaunt said …
Thanks - I was going nuts trying to get the Vista help to tell me this secret. One second searching online and I found your article. Kudos!
on 26 Aug 2008 at 3:48 am 17.rein said …
Thank you so much. May the Gods/Goddesses of digital happiness beat a PATH to your door…
on 23 Sep 2008 at 2:15 am 18.Gabriel Spencer said …
I went to copy a path for java, I’m a student, and mistakenly took out the origanal path could someone please help? I’m running Vista home premium sp1
on 03 Oct 2008 at 6:54 am 19.Jerome said …
Thx i couldnt find it in 2 min so i searched inet for “vista path variable” then found ur article first website gg ty =D
on 13 Nov 2008 at 9:39 pm 20.G said …
Thanks for the help!!