Handy tool to find executable program location?

Question

I remembered that I used a tool called as where to find locations for any executable programs like this in a console:

 C:\Tmp\Where myTool.exe
 C:\Program Files\MyApp\myTools.exe
 ....

Now I cannot find this tool. Not sure if Windows has a build-in tool to do that finding?

Answer 1

I think you may be thinking of the which command in Linux.

$ which bash
/bin/bash

I'm not aware of an equivalent tool in Windows.

EDIT: I just remembered that there's a package called Unix Utils for Windows that would provide this functionality for you.

Answer 2

use dir:

cd \
dir /s /b mytool.exe

the cd \ part changes you to the root of the drive, to ensure searching starts at the top of the hierarchy.

Answer 3

Frustrating that it's not built-in as a simple command.

However, there are several solutions, one of which is a batch file.

Create a batch file (which.bat) as follows:

@setlocal
@set P2=.;%PATH%
@for %%e in (%PATHEXT%) do @for %%i in (%~n1%%e) do @if NOT "%%~$P2:i"=="" echo %%~$P2:i

This looks in the local directory, will take a filename parameter with or without an extension, and return the first match from the current directory or in the PATH.

Then run it like which cmd.exe to find the cmd.exe that will execute if you type in cmd.

Answer 4

Various answers over on Stack OverFlow

Answer 5

On windows you can use the free utility Everything search engine to search instantly for any file by full or partial name (if your hard disk is formatted in ntfs).

Answer 6

If you just want which, the GnuWin32 project has a bunch of unix utils with individual installers.