In Linux, we have the "which" command to find out the path of an executable.
What is its Windows equivalent? Is there any PowerShell command for doing that?
6 Answers
Newer versions of Windows (I think Windows 2003 and up) have the where command:
C:\>where ping C:\Windows\System32\PING.EXE And for PowerShell, explicitly add the .exe suffix:
PS C:\>where.exe ping C:\Windows\System32\PING.EXE Yes, Get-Command will find all commands including executables:
PS\> Get-Command ipconfig If you want to limit the commands to just executables:
PS\> Get-Command -CommandType Application Will find all exes in your path. There is an alias for interactive use:
PS\> gcm net* -CommandType Application To get the path of an executable, you can use the Path property of the returned object. For example:
PS\> (Get-Command notepad.exe).Path For more info, run man Get-Command -full.
where.exe explicitly rather than where works for me in PowerShell:
PS C:\Users\birdc> where ping PS C:\Users\birdc> where.exe ping C:\Windows\System32\PING.EXE In addition to user10404, the help command will work on aliases, so you can use the same command name (gcm) for help and interactive use:
help gcm -Parameter * # or man gcm -Par * If you want to make it short, create a one line which.cmd file with the content
echo %~$PATH:1 This will search the first parameter (%1) fed to the script and display the full path of found file. Good place to put this script in windows 10 is %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WindowsApps\which.cmd
And you get your which command in path.
c:\>which cmd.exe c:\>echo C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe Cmd
where
C:\Users\X>where ping C:\Windows\System32\PING.EXE C:\Users\X> Powershell
Get-Command
PS C:\Users\X> Get-Command ping CommandType Name Version Source ----------- ---- ------- ------ Application PING.EXE 10.0.1776… C:\WINDOWS\system32\PING.EXE PS C:\Users\X> 
