How do you avoid over-populating the PATH Environment Variable in Windows?

Question

I would like to know what are the approaches that you use to manage the executables in your system. For example I have almost everything accessible through the command line,

Answer 1

The solutions above only work if you can trim down your path. In my case, that wasn't really an option, and it was a hassle to have to run a script every time I opened a command prompt. So I wrote a simple script that runs automatically when opening the command prompt, and appends the contents of a text file to your path.

There are also some contexts where having this script run breaks things (say, in a github or cygwin shell), so I also added a file that contains a list of paths that, if the command prompt is started in them, the path variable isn't changed via the startup script that normally updates the path.

@echo off

:: Modify these to the actual paths of these two files
set dontSetupFile=C:\Users\Yams\Dontsetup.txt
set pathFile=C:\Users\Yams\Path.txt

:: Retrieve the current path (for determining whether or not we should append to our path)
set curDir=%cd%

:: Be done if the current path is listed in the dontSetupFile
SetLocal EnableDelayedExpansion
for /F "delims=" %%i in (%dontSetupFile%) do (
    if "%%i"=="%curDir%" GOTO AllDone
)



:: Append the pathFile to our current PATH
set pathAppend=
for /F "delims=" %%i in (%pathFile%) do (set pathAppend=!pathAppend!%%i)

set PATH=%PATH%;%pathAppend%


:: The only way to actually modify a command prompt's path via a batch file is by starting
::   up another command prompt window. So we will do this, however, if this script is
::   automatically called on startup of any command prompt window, it will infinately 
::   recurse and bad things will happen.

:: If we already ran, we are done
if "%yams%"=="onion" GOTO AllDone

:: Otherwise, flag that we just ran, and then start up a new command prompt window
::   with this flag set
set yams=onion

cmd \K set PATH=%PATH%;

:: When that command prompt exits, it will load back up this command prompt window, and
::   then the user will need to exit out of this as well. This causes this window to
::   automatically exit once the cmd it just spawned is closed.
exit()

:: Path is set up, we are done!
:AllDone
@echo on

And Path.txt will look something like

C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\google_appengine;
C:\Program Files (x86)\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static;
C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft DNX\Dnvm;
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Windows Performance Toolkit;

While Dontsetup.txt will look something like

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Windows Performance Toolkit
C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\cmd
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\bin

To make this run automatically on startup, open regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Command Processor, then right click on the right and press new -> Multi-String Value. Name it AutoRun. Set it's value to

C:\Users\Yams\setUpPath.bat

or wherever else you stored the batch file above.