PyWinPath is an interactive command line tool to edit the %PATH% environment variable on Windows 7. The onboard tools for managing the content of %PATH% before Windows 10 are barely existent and easily lead to a cluttered %PATH%. If the PATH is longer than a specific limit, Windows will silently omit the entries that exceed the maximum length and executables will not be found.
PyWinPath tries to keep you sane when facing the %PATH%. There are many free tools to edit the %PATH%, however, I couldn't find a nice one in Python. Windows 10 has its own GUI to manipulate the %PATH%, I haven't seen it yet.
On Windows, the content of the %PATH% is generated from two registry values: the entries in the system-wide path followed by entries in the user-specific path.
- User path:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment::PATH- System path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment::Path
PyWinPath lets you manipulate both of these registry values and does a couple of additional tricks, see the features listing below.
Developed and tested on Windows 7 (EN-US) with Python 3.5, so don't expect it to work in Python 2 or on other systems. Please let me know if it worked for you in other combinations, if not open an issue on Github, send me a patch or pull request.
pip install pywinpath
Or if you want to see some colored output (this will install colorama):
pip install pywinpath[color]
After installation you can call it simply with
pywinpath
Alternatively, *.exe binaries created with PyInstaller are available from https://github.com/czamb/pywinpath/releases
- Warns you of a too long %PATH% on Windows 7
- Normalization of PATH entries followed by ...
- Deduplication of system and user PATH variables
- Purge non-existent directories from PATH variables
- Shortening of PATH variables via junctions, e.g. C:Program Files... gets C:prg...
- Insert entries at the beginning of the PATH
- Add possibility to call with arguments instead of as interactive menu
- Move entries up and down and between sys and user path (only after dedup?)
- Handle variable expansions in PATH definitions such as %USERPROFILE%
- Automatically identify efficient sub-paths for shortening via junctions
- More tests
- Test on other Windows-Python3 combinations than Windows 7 - Python 3.5
- With Git for Windows installed, the following command should display a more readable PATH listing on the console:
PATH | tr ; '\n'
- Junctions work for PATH shortening, also accross local drives:
- >mklink /J C:prog(x86) "C:Program Files (x86)"
- >set PATH=c:prog(x86)Notepad++;%PATH%
- Notepad++.exe is found.
- Junctions can be deleted by rmdir, the target dir is left untouched.
Motivated by Anaconda errors with too long paths:
D:\proj>activate Deactivating environment "C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3"... Activating environment "C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3"... The input line is too long. "PATH_NO_SCRIPTS=C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3;[...]"
Some links:
- Viewed about 40k times: http://superuser.com/questions/297947/is-there-a-convenient-way-to-edit-path-in-windows-7
- Another PATH minipulation tool for the command line http://www.p-nand-q.com/download/gtools/pathed.html
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34818282/anaconda-prompt-loading-error-the-input-line-is-too-long
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19287379/how-do-i-add-to-the-windows-path-variable-using-setx-having-weird-problems
- https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/limitation-to-the-length-of-the-system-path-variable
- http://betanews.com/2015/11/23/windows-10-finally-adds-a-new-path-editor/
- http://superuser.com/questions/1070272/why-does-windows-have-a-limit-on-environment-variables-at-all