What's blocking your %PATH%?

This tip was submitted to the SearchWin2000.com Tip Exchange by member Jim Ruby. Let other users know how useful it is by rating the tip below.

Do you have 20 or 30 entries in your PATH variable? Do you really know what is in the PATH? Or are you like me, never knowing for sure because there so much going on in there?

That jumble of directories used to be enough to give me major headaches when I needed to see if a particular directory was included in my local PATH variable. But now I use this quick little batch file (only tested on Windows 2000 -- sorry) that strips the PATH variable apart and displays each entry on a separate line. (I threw in the line numbering just for looks.) 

@echo off

:*** Use this to display a line count
SET /A COUNT=%COUNT%+1

:*** If this is the first pass through, 
:***    save the current path into a variable
:***    that will be parsed later

if "%1"=="" (
 set SHORTPATH=%PATH%
 echo.
 )
) ELSE (
 rem *** Parse SHORTPATH, putting the first directory in the f variable,
 rem ***   and the the rest in the g variable

 for /F "tokens=1,* delims=;" %%f in ("%SHORTPATH%") do (
 echo %COUNT% %%f

 rem *** Save the remainder of the path and run again.
 set SHORTPATH=%%g
 if "%SHORTPATH%"=="" GOTO EXITSUB
 %0 Continue
)
 
:EXITSUB
set SHORTPATH=
set COUNT=

@echo on

This was first published in February 2003

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