Finding the path of the program that will execute from the command line in Windows

Question

Say I have a program X EXE installed in folder c  abcd happy  on the system  The folder is on the system path  Now suppose there is another program on the system that s also called X EXE but is installed in folder c  windows    Is it possible to quickly find out from the command line that if I type in X EXE which of the two X EXE s will get launched   but without having to dir search or look at the process details in Task Manager    Maybe some sort of in-built command  or some program out there that can do something like this     detect program path X EXE

User · Answer

As the thread mentioned in the comment  get-command in powershell can also work it out  For example  you can type get-command npm and the  output is as below

User · Answer

Use the where command   The first result in the list is the one that will execute    C    where notepad C  Windows System32 notepad exe C  Windows notepad exe   According to this blog post  where exe is included with Windows Server 2003 and later  so this should just work with Vista  Win 7  et al   On Linux  the equivalent is the which command  e g  which ssh

User · Answer

Here s a little cmd script you can copy-n-paste into a file named something like where cmd    echo off rem - search for the given file in the directories specified by the path  and display the first match rem rem    The main ideas for this script were taken from Raymond Chen s blog  rem rem         http   blogs msdn com b oldnewthing archive 2005 01 20 357225 asp rem rem rem - it ll be nice to at some point extend this so it won t stop on the first match  That ll rem     help diagnose situations with a conflict of some sort  rem  setlocal  rem - search the current directory as well as those in the path set PATHLIST    PATH  set EXTLIST  PATHEXT   if not   EXTLIST         goto  extlist ok set EXTLIST  COM  EXE  BAT  CMD  VBS  VBE  JS  JSE  WSF  WSH  extlist ok  rem - first look for the file as given  not adding extensions  for   i in   1  do if NOT      PATHLIST i      echo     PATHLIST i  rem - now look for the file adding extensions from the EXTLIST for   e in   EXTLIST   do  for   i in   1  e  do if NOT      PATHLIST i      echo     PATHLIST i

[windows] Finding the path of the program that will execute from the command line in Windows

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