A command-line utility for MS Windows to keep the Windows PATH variable tidy and short.
Project description
PyWinPath is an interactive command line tool to edit the %PATH% environment variable on Windows 7. The onboard tools for managing the content of %PATH% before Windows 10 are barely existent and easily lead to a cluttered %PATH%. If the PATH is longer than a specific limit, Windows will silently omit the entries that exceed the maximum length and executables will not be found.
PyWinPath tries to keep you sane when facing the %PATH%. There are many free tools to edit the %PATH%, however, I couldn’t find a nice one in Python. Windows 10 has its own GUI to manipulate the %PATH%, I haven’t seen it yet.
On Windows, the content of the %PATH% is generated from two registry values: the entries in the system-wide path followed by entries in the user-specific path.
User path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment::PATH
System path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment::Path
PyWinPath lets you manipulate both of these registry values and does a couple of additional tricks, see the features listing below.
Developed and tested on Windows 7 (EN-US) with Python 3.5, so don’t expect it to work in Python 2 or on other systems. Please let me know if it worked for you in other combinations, if not open an issue on Github, send me a patch or pull request.
Installation
pip install pywinpath
Or if you want to see some colored output (this will install colorama):
pip install pywinpath[color]
Features
Warns you of a too long %PATH% on Windows 7
Normalization of PATH entries followed by …
Deduplication of system and user PATH variables
Purge non-existent directories from PATH variables
Shortening of PATH variables via junctions, e.g. C:Program Files... gets C:prg...
Insert entries at the beginning of the PATH
ToDo
Add possibility to call with arguments instead of as interactive menu
Move entries up and down and between sys and user path (only after dedup?)
Handle variable expansions in PATH definitions such as %USERPROFILE%
Automatically identify efficient sub-paths for shortening via junctions
More tests
Test on other Windows-Python3 combinations than Windows 7 - Python 3.5
Notes
With Git for Windows installed, the following command should display a more readable PATH listing on the console: PATH | tr ; '\n'
- Junctions work for PATH shortening, also accross local drives:
>mklink /J C:prog(x86) “C:Program Files (x86)”
>set PATH=c:prog(x86)Notepad++;%PATH%
Notepad++.exe is found.
Junctions can be deleted by rmdir, the target dir is left untouched.
Motivated by Anaconda errors with too long paths:
D:\proj>activate Deactivating environment "C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3"... Activating environment "C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3"... The input line is too long. "PATH_NO_SCRIPTS=C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3;[...]"
Some links:
Viewed about 40k times: http://superuser.com/questions/297947/is-there-a-convenient-way-to-edit-path-in-windows-7
Another PATH minipulation tool for the command line http://www.p-nand-q.com/download/gtools/pathed.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34818282/anaconda-prompt-loading-error-the-input-line-is-too-long
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/limitation-to-the-length-of-the-system-path-variable
http://betanews.com/2015/11/23/windows-10-finally-adds-a-new-path-editor/
