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Possible Duplicate:
Best practice for Windows PATH/environment variables managing?

If you use tools at the windows command line frequently, you know the drill. You install tool X. Unless you want to type out the path to X every time you want to run it from the command line, you end up putting C:\path\to\x into your path. It seems like after a while this might end poorly. Its similar to putting too much stuff in the global namespace in programming. You may run

C:>build.exe

And if there's two build.exe's in your path, its not immediately obvious which will have precedence.

Linux kind of handles this nicely by have a few canonical places where executables are placed. Windows doesn't have this unfortunately.

Is there a clean way to handle Windows paths so that every time I install a new program I don't have to update the path AND I can feel safe executing things in the Windows command line? Whats the cleanest/safest way to handle this?

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    Definitely a dup.
    – surfasb
    Sep 19, 2011 at 16:31
  • Yeah I agree, voting to close my own question as duplicate. Hopefully this one will help people find the other one.
    – Doug T.
    Sep 19, 2011 at 17:56

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