On my NT machine I frequently need to know if a directory is in the path. Instead of typing "path" and trying to read the jumbled mess that NT returns, I use perl. :)
perl -we "print join qq'\n', split ';', $ENV{path}"

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RE: Windows Path
by Intrepid (Curate) on Sep 26, 2000 at 09:37 UTC

    Welll (drawl) .. pretty nice, but .. how about a nice little DOSKEY macro assisted by Perl, to give you a nice UNI*-style path listing if you have HOMEDRIVE defined in your ENV, or DOS-style with proper right-leaning slashes if not? ($ENV{'HOMEDRIVE'} maps a drive to the UNI* root `/'; on my system that's `D:').

    Could come in handy.

    ms shell> DOSKEY RPATH=perl -e "@wp=split ';', $ENV{path};@wp=map {s# +\\#/#g; $_;} @wp; @PP=($uROOT=$ENV{'HOMEDRIVE'})? map {s#\A$uROOT##i; + s#\A([^^$uROOT]) (?:\:\/)#'/'. lc ${1} .((${1} eq $uROOT)? '':'/')#x +ei;$_;} @wp : @wp; @PP=map{s#\:##; $_;} @PP; print join qq'\n', @PP;"

    This is equivalent to the one-liner below (DOSKEY macros cause us to generate rather obfuscated Perl, don't they :-)?

    perl -e "@wp=split ';', $ENV{path};@wp=map {s#\\#/#g; $_;} @wp; @PP=($ +uROOT=$ENV{'HOMEDRIVE'})? map {s#\A$uROOT##i; s#\A([^$uROOT]) (?:\:\/ +)#'/'. lc $1 .(($1 eq $uROOT)? '':'/')#xei;$_;} @wp : @wp; @PP=map{s# +\:##; $_;} @PP; print join qq'\n', @PP;"

    On my system, to illustrate what I mean, this is output:

    
    /console
    /usr/local/bin/java/bin
    /MingW32/gcc-2.95.2/bin
    /bin
    /ActivePERL/bin
    /usr/bin
    /e/scr
    /c/WINNT/system32
    /c/WINNT
    /c/stdJava/bin
    /usr/tmake/bin
    
    

    Soren Andersen

    Edited 2003.07.27 just clean-up.


    Update 2003.08.03 -- A little observation regarding this old posting.

    The code above would never have worked in MS Win9x, which has a 127-char limit on length of command lines. I have created a revised version of it which does work on Win9x, at the cost of some additional support complexity...

    Update 2003.08.18 -- Refactored again since some temporary brain misfire cleared and I recalled the availability of the \l | \L operators to do what I was trying to accomplish with an eval.
    DOSKEY macro in the form it takes as a macro file .mac on disk
    PUP=perl -MEnv"=PATH,D0" -le"print join qq/\n/,(grep{($$D0&&s#\A$$D0## +i)or s#\A([A-Z]):#/\l$$1#i}map{s#\\#/#g;$$_}split(';',$$PATH))"
    To support this, one needs to set a variable %D0% in the environment:
         SET D0=%HOMEDRIVE%
    

    Obviously this is little more than a toy, there is very little utility to it. Still, I had some fun figuring out how to code it ;-).

    The doubled-dollar signs ($$) in the code above are not dereferencing of anything in perl, they are there because as a macro on disk, the first $ will be eaten when the macro is read in by the Windows shell interpreter. They must be removed if the macro is input manually.