Is there an equivalent of 'which' on the W

Question

As I sometimes have path problems, where one of my own cmd scripts is hidden (shadowed) by another program (earlier on the path), I would like to be able to find the full path to a program on the Windows command line, given just its name.

Is there an equivalent to the UNIX command 'which'?

On UNIX, which command prints the full path of the given command to easily find and repair these shadowing problems.

Answer 1

Go get unxutils from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/

gold on windows platforms, puts all the nice unix utilities on a standard windows DOS. Been using it for years.

It has a 'which' included. Note that it's case sensitive though.

NB: to install it explode the zip somewhere and add ...\UnxUtils\usr\local\wbin\ to your system path env variable.

Answer 2

If you have PowerShell installed (which I recommend), you can use the following command as a rough equivalent (substitute programName for your executable's name):

($Env:Path).Split(";") | Get-ChildItem -filter programName*

More is here: My Manwich! PowerShell Which

Answer 3

Cygwin is a solution. If you don't mind using a third-party solution, then Cygwin is the way to go.

Cygwin gives you the comfort of *nix in the Windows environment (and you can use it in your Windows command shell, or use a *nix shell of your choice). It gives you a whole host of *nix commands (like which) for Windows, and you can just include that directory in your PATH.

Answer 4

This batch file uses CMD variable handling to find the command that would be executed in the path. Note: that the current directory is always done before the path) and depending on which API call is used other locations are searched before/after the path.

@echo off
echo. 
echo PathFind - Finds the first file in in a path
echo ======== = ===== === ===== ==== == == = ====
echo. 
echo Searching for %1 in %path%
echo. 
set a=%~$PATH:1
If "%a%"=="" (Echo %1 not found) else (echo %1 found at %a%)

See set /? for help.

Answer 5

For you Windows XP users (who have no where command built-in), I have written a "where like" command as a rubygem called whichr.

To install it, install Ruby.

Then

gem install whichr

Run it like:

C:> whichr cmd_here

Answer 6

The best version of this I've found on Windows is Joseph Newcomer's "whereis" utility, which is available (with source) from his site.

The article about the development of "whereis" is worth reading.