Postgres “psql not recognized as an internal or external command”

Question

For Postgres, I keep getting this error multiple times even though I have already set the location of the bin folder to the path variable in Windows 8. Is there something else I

Answer 1

I had your issue and got it working again (on windows 7).

My setup had actually worked at first. I installed postgres and then set up the system PATH variables with C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.6\bin; C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.6\lib. The psql keyword in the command line gave no errors.

I deleted the PATH variables above one at a time to test if they were both really needed. Psql continued to work after I deleted the lib path, but stopped working after I deleted the bin path. When I returned bin, it still didn't work, and the same with lib. I closed and reopened the command line between tries, and checked the path. The problem lingered even though the path was identical to how it had been when working. I re-pasted it.

I uninstalled and reinstalled postgres. The problem lingered. It finally worked after I deleted the spaces between the "; C:..." in the paths and re-saved.

Not sure if it was really the spaces that were the culprit. Maybe the environment variables just needed to be altered and refreshed after the install.

I'm also still not sure if both lib and bin paths are needed since there seems to be some kind of lingering memory for old path configurations. I don't want to test it again though.