Sometimes you need to find the absolute path to an executable program, just like the command line utility which does on Unix. Here's a bit of code that searches PATH for the executable trying various extensions (and without one, in case you already appended one yourself), and populates an array with it.

p.s. Apparently -x doesn't work for DLL files. Not so nice.

# input:
# my $f = 'perl';  # for example
# via command line:
my $f = shift;

# output:
my @exec;

{
    use File::Spec;
    my @ext = split /;/, $ENV{PATHEXT} || '.exe;.com;.bat';
    foreach my $p (File::Spec->path) {
        push @exec, grep { -f and -x } map File::Spec->catfile($p, "$f
+$_"), '', @ext;
        # You may leave the loop when something is found, if you only 
+care about the first
    }
    @exec or die "Can't find executable $f";
}

# Show result:
{
    local $\ = "\n";
    print for @exec;
}

[download]

In reply to `which` (for Windows) in pure perl by bart

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