What is Windows' equivalent of the "which" command in Unix? Is there an equivalent PowerShell command?

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?

2

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

6

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

3

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>

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Sign up using Google Sign up using Facebook Sign up using Email and Password Submit

Post as a guest

Post Your Answer Discard

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy