Why is my PATH environment variable different from the command prompt?
Windows has two classes of environment variables system environment variables and user environment variables. If you are using echo %PATH%
you will see your user environment variable PATH
. Only if there is no user variable defined, the system variable will be in effect for user processes.
The PATH
separator ;
should not be followed by a blank.
The following Microsoft note might be helpful:
You can modify user environment variables by editing the following Registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \
Environment
You can modify system environment variables by editing the following Registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \
SYSTEM \
CurrentControlSet \
Control \
Session Manager \
Environment
Note that any environment variable that needs to be expanded (for example, when you use %SYSTEM%
) must be stored in the registry as a REG_EXPAND_SZ
registry value. Any values of type REG_SZ
will not be expanded when read from the registry.
Additional remark: Whenever a process changes its environment (rather than the registry settings which define the environment for new processes), the changes are only visible for child processes.
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Community
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Community over 1 year
A bit of important background: my company has a generic login VBS script that makes modifications to the user PATH environment variable upon login and allows me to run software that has dependencies on mapped DFS fileshares. I also recently installed the Windows Powershell SDK to my Windows 7 Enterprise machine and attempted to try out modifying my PATH environment variable from the Powershell command line.
Following this, I noticed that I could no longer run applications that correspond to these login PATH modifications and that the environment variable editor PATH was set to something different than what was showing up when I issued an
'echo %PATH%'
from the command prompt.So for example (simplification), from the environment variable editor (
My Computer properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables
) I hadC:\MyDir\; C:\MyOtherDir
whereas when I did
'echo %PATH%'
from a command prompt I got:C:\MyDir\
Has anyone else had a similar issue and was there some sort of resolution? When I googled for help, I came upon this:
(Related?) StackOverflow Thread
It occurred to me that if the login script was initiated by something other than my Explorer.exe environment, then that was the problem. However, when I ran the login script myself, my PATH from command prompt was unchanged. What would this have to do with PowerShell? I'm missing how this is connected to that install completely.
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Admin almost 11 yearsHow did you modify the path in powershell? Where did you echo %PATH%? In cmd.exe?
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Admin almost 7 yearsTHE ANSWER BELOW IS GENIUS.
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Johnny_D over 10 yearsThere are no values to be modified, only two variables
tmp
andtemp
. Are you sure that this is the path for user, that should be modified? -
Martin Argerami over 7 yearsThis doesn't seem to work (prior to a reboot, at least). The path variable is not in the HKCU\Environment, the path variable in cmd.exe shows correctly, but launched applications are still seeing the old path variable.
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Axel Kemper over 7 years@Martin: yes, launched application do not recognize registry changes, because they get their memory copy of the environment during application startup. This copy depends on the parent process which starts the sub-processes. If they are for instance started from Windows Explorer, you'd have to restart Explorer to get the new PATH.
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SDsolar almost 7 yearsYou nailed it on the head! The Path in there was adding some programs that I knew had been removed, such as Microsoft SQL. I knew it wasn't coming from the system properties path I had set. Thank you very much - from the future - you posted this answer more than 3 years ago.