Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Mpath: command-line path manipulation for Windows

I'm a command line geek. Windows' style of installing everything in its own directory makes it easier to clean up after uninstallation, but it makes for very long PATH environment variables. If I put every directory containing command line tools in the system path, it gets too long for Windows to handle. So I usually end up doing "PATH=%PATH%;c:\somethingelse\bin" just before I use it. That also makes for long paths over long runtimes, especially when you use it in batch files (since you end up with PATH=c:\somethingelse\bin;c:\somethingelse\bin;c:\somethingelse\bin;[rest of path] after multiple invocations).

So I wrote mpath. Mpath is a combination batch file and Python script that takes advantage of some quirks of the Windows command shell, to let a child process alter the environment of a parent command shell process (something that you typically can't do in win32, but mpath gets around it by creating a temporary batch file that gets executed in the parent process).

Syntax:

  • mpath pathname : prepends pathname to the current command shell's PATH, if it doesn't already exist.
  • mpath + pathname : appends pathname to the current command shell's PATH, if it doesn't already exist.
  • mpath - pathname : removes pathname from the current command shell's PATH, if it exists.

A quick demo:

C:\> PATH=C:

C:\> PATH
PATH=C:

C:\> mpath c:\foo (prepend c:\foo to the path)

C:\> PATH
PATH=c:\foo;C:

C:\> mpath - C:\FOO (take it off the path--note case insensitivity)

C:\> PATH
PATH=C:

C:\> mpath + c:\foo (append c:\foo to the path)

C:\> PATH
PATH=C:\;c:\foo

C:\> mpath c:\foo (try to prepend it again--mpath knows it's already there)
c:\foo already in path.

C:\> PATH=%PATH%;c:\foo (silly user should have used mpath...)

C:\> PATH
PATH=C:\;c:\foo;c:\foo (now there are two copies!)

C:\> mpath - C:\FOO (but mpath takes care of that.)

C:\> PATH
PATH=C:


I've tested Mpath with Windows XP running Python 2.5 and 2.6. I know it doesn't work on 3.x; I plan on fixing that at some point when I need it.



Update: mpath is now tested on 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, and 3.1.

4 comments:

dwelden said...

An old trick I picked up long ago is to put .. in your path. Automatically get parent directory in your path, regardless of current directory. In some situations with long path names and the need for upper level folders, it can help out with the path length limitation.

John Frag said...

Long Path Tool helped me to solve that problem

Dan peterson said...

Yes! I can suggest long path tool is the popular program.
With the Anniversary Update of Windows 10, you can finally abandon the 260 character maximum path limit in Windows. … Windows 95 abandoned that to allow long file names, but still limited the maximum path length (which includes the full folder path and the file name) to 260 characters.

Dan peterson said...

Yes! When cleaning files from a Windows Operating System (OS), you are halted with errors relating to the filename or the file "long path tool".