Setting a system environment variable from a Windows batch file

Question

Is it possible to set a environment variable at the system level from a command prompt in Windows 7  or even XP for that matter   I am running from an elevated command prompt   When I use the set command  set name value   the environment variable seems to be only valid for the session of the command prompt

User · Answer

Just in case you would need to delete a variable  you could use SETENV from Vincent Fatica available at http   barnyard syr edu  vefatica  Not exactly recent   98  but still working on Windows 7 x64

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The XP Support Tools  which can be installed from your XP CD  come with a program called setx exe   C  Program Files Support Tools gt setx     SETX  This program is used to set values in the environment of the machine or currently logged on user using one of three modes   1  Command Line Mode  setx variable value  -m     Optional Switches      -m  Set value in the Machine environment  Default is User       For more information and example use  SETX -i   I think Windows 7 actually comes with setx as part of a standard install

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Simple example for how to set JAVA HOME with setx exe in command line   setx JAVA HOME  C  Program Files  x86  Java jdk1 7 0 04    This will set environment variable  JAVA HOME  for current user  If you want to set a variable for all users  you have to use option  -m   Here is an example   setx -m JAVA HOME  C  Program Files  x86  Java jdk1 7 0 04    Note  you have to execute this command as Administrator   Note  Make sure to run the command setx from an command-line Admin window

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SetX is the command that you ll need in most of the cases Though its possible to use REG or REGEDIT Using registry editing commands you can avoid some of the restrictions of the SetX command - different data types  variables containing   in their name and so on   echo off     requires admin elevated permissions   setting system variable REG ADD  quot HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Session Manager Environment quot   v MyVar  D MyVal   expandable variable REG ADD  quot HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Session Manager Environment quot   T REG EXPAND SZ  v MyVar  D MyVal      does not require admin permissions   setting user variable REG ADD  quot HKEY CURRENT USER Environment quot   v  C   D  quot C   test quot   REG is the pure registry client but its possible also to import the data with REGEDIT though it allows using only hard coded values  or generation of a temp files   The example here is a hybrid file that contains both batch code and registry data  should be saved as  bat - mind that in batch   are ignored as delimiters while they are used as comments in  reg files   REGEDIT4     ECHO OFF   CLS   REGEDIT EXE  S  quot   f0 quot    EXIT   HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Session Manager Environment   quot SystemVariable quot   quot GlobalValue quot    HKEY CURRENT USER Environment   quot UserVariable quot   quot SomeValue quot

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For XP  I used a  free donateware  tool called  RAPIDEE   Rapid Environment Editor   but SETX is definitely sufficient for Win 7  I did not know about this before

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If you set a variable via SETX  you cannot use this variable or its changes immediately  You have to restart the processes that want to use it   Use the following sequence to directly set it in the setting process too  works for me perfectly in scripts that do some init stuff after setting global variables    SET XYZ test SETX XYZ test

User · Answer

System variables can be set through CMD and registry  For ex  reg query  HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Session Manager Environment   v PATH  All the commonly used CMD codes and system variables are given here  Set Windows system environment variables using CMD   Open CMD and type Set  You will get all the values of system variable   Type set java to know the path details of java installed on your window OS

[windows] Setting a system environment variable from a Windows batch file?

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