How to Edit Your System PATH for Easy Command Line Access

Have you ever wondered why you can just type ipconfig into a command prompt and it works, but when you want to use a command line program you downloaded you have to navigate to its directory? Here’s how to fix that.

Adding a Folder To Your PATH

Open Computer and right-click on any white space, then select properties from the context menu.

When the System section of Control Panel opens, click on the Advanced system settings hyperlink in the left hand pane.

Then you will need to click on the Environment Variables button.

The variable we are looking for is a System variable called Path, once you have found it, click on the edit button.

In order to add an entry to your path, you need to precede the folder name with a semi-colon. For example, if i want to add the How-To Geek folder which is on the root of my C drive to my path i would the following to the end of the Variable value field:

;C:\How-To Geek

Now i can access any content within the How-To Geek folder without having to drill down into the directory.