pywinpath 2016.5.3b3

A command-line utility for MS Windows to keep the Windows PATH variable tidy and short.

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.

Installation

pip install pywinpath

Or if you want to see some colored output (this will install colorama):

pip install pywinpath[color]

Features

• 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

ToDo

• 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

Notes

• 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:

  1. >mklink /J C:prog(x86) “C:Program Files (x86)”

  2. >set PATH=c:prog(x86)Notepad++;%PATH%

  3. Notepad++.exe is found.

  4. 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/