Is there an equivalent of 'which' on the Windows command line?

Question

As I sometimes have path problems, where one of my own cmd scripts is hidden (shadowed) by another program (earlier on the path), I would like to be able to find the full pa

Answer 1

Under PowerShell, Get-Command will find executables anywhere in $Env:PATH.

Get-Command eventvwr

CommandType   Name          Definition
-----------   ----          ----------
Application   eventvwr.exe  c:\windows\system32\eventvwr.exe
Application   eventvwr.msc  c:\windows\system32\eventvwr.msc

It also finds PowerShell cmdlets, functions, aliases, files with custom executables extensions via $Env:PATHEXT, etc. defined for the current shell (quite akin to Bash's type -a foo) - making it a better go-to than other tools like where.exe, which.exe, etc which are unaware of these PowerShell commands.

Finding executables using only part of the name

gcm *disk*

CommandType     Name                             Version    Source
-----------     ----                             -------    ------
Alias           Disable-PhysicalDiskIndication   2.0.0.0    Storage
Alias           Enable-PhysicalDiskIndication    2.0.0.0    Storage
Function        Add-PhysicalDisk                 2.0.0.0    Storage
Function        Add-VirtualDiskToMaskingSet      2.0.0.0    Storage
Function        Clear-Disk                       2.0.0.0    Storage
Cmdlet          Get-PmemDisk                     1.0.0.0    PersistentMemory
Cmdlet          New-PmemDisk                     1.0.0.0    PersistentMemory
Cmdlet          Remove-PmemDisk                  1.0.0.0    PersistentMemory
Application     diskmgmt.msc                     0.0.0.0    C:\WINDOWS\system32\diskmgmt.msc
Application     diskpart.exe                     10.0.17... C:\WINDOWS\system32\diskpart.exe
Application     diskperf.exe                     10.0.17... C:\WINDOWS\system32\diskperf.exe
Application     diskraid.exe                     10.0.17... C:\WINDOWS\system32\diskraid.exe
...

Finding custom executables

To find other non-windows executables (python, ruby, perl, etc), file extensions for those executables need to be added to the PATHEXT environmental variable (defaults to .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC;.CPL) to identify files with these extensions in the PATH as executable. As Get-Command also honours this variable, it can be extended to list custom executables. e.g.

$Env:PATHEXT="$Env:PATHEXT;.dll;.ps1;.psm1;.py"     # temporary assignment, only for this shell's process

gcm user32,kernel32,*WASM*,*http*py

CommandType     Name                        Version    Source
-----------     ----                        -------    ------
ExternalScript  Invoke-WASMProfiler.ps1                C:\WINDOWS\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Invoke-WASMProfiler.ps1
Application     http-server.py              0.0.0.0    C:\Users\ME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\http-server.py
Application     kernel32.dll                10.0.17... C:\WINDOWS\system32\kernel32.dll
Application     user32.dll                  10.0.17... C:\WINDOWS\system32\user32.dll

You can quickly set up an alias with sal which gcm (short form of set-alias which get-command).

More information and examples can be found under the online help for Get-Command.