Cannot find `.exe` files (in PATH) from CMD after installing WSL

Question

After installing Ubuntu 20.04 using WSL, I cannot run .exe files from CMD without providing the suffix .exe.

Answer 1

It turns out that PATHEXT in CMD does not include the PATHEXT set from the System environment variables any more:

If I type from CMD:

> echo %PATHEXT%
.PL

Notice that the settings from the system variables are not included. You can fix this by adding .exe to PATHEXT for the User variables (not system variables):

If I now close CMD and reopen:

> echo %PATHEXT%
.ext;.bat;.PL