'findstr' is not recognized as an internal or external command,

Question

I got the following error while starting JBoss from a command line prompt today:

\'findstr\' is not recognized as an internal or external command
         


        

Answer 1

As others pointed, issue is in wrong settings of PATH variable in Windows. According to article this is most probably because some stupid installer wrongly modified PATH variable in Windows registry. Registry has 2 different string value types - REG_SZ and REG_EXPAND_SZ. Only the second one allows for expansion of %SystemRoot%.

So check your path by typing set path in command prompt. If you see unexpanded %SystemRoot% and other variables in Path, you are affected (PATH should show only plain directory names, not variables).

You need to edit Path variable in registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment. As it is not possible to change the type of key, save the path value somewhere, delete the key and re-create it with type REG_EXPAND_SZ. You need to logout for changes to take effect.