Charlie Russel's Blog

The path on many modern computers gets to be so long that reading it is a nuisance. Worse, from within Windows PowerShell, there isn’t a built in equivalent to the old cmd “path” command. Yet all the information we need is there, it’s just not where we might expect it. The actual executable path for a PowerShell session is stored in $ENV:path. Here’s a quick function you put in your $profile to print out the PATH, one line for each item:

Function path { 
   $p=$env:path 
   $p.Split(':') 
}

Simple, wasn’t it? Now, when you type “path” from the Windows PowerShell prompt, you’ll see something like this:

PSH> path 
C:\Windows\system32 
C:\Windows 
C:\Windows\System32\Wbem 
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\ 
C:\Users\charlie.russel\psbin