There are a number of things to remember when you deal with the Path environment variable in Windows.

1. The items in the Path string are seperated by semicolon: ;, there should be no space around the semicolon. “C:\SomePath ; C:\AnotherPath” is NOT OK.

2. It is better to use \ instead of any / in the string.

3. No final backslash as in: C:\SomeDirectory\.

4. Whenever you make a change to Path variable, be sure to close and reopen any Cmd or Shell window.

5. You can add a new environment variable as “myexedir” and add that variable as ;%myexedir% to the Path string.

6. Open cmd.exe with administrator privileges and type:

   setx path “%path%;C:\Python27” /m

/m makes the changes at the system environment, if you omit it then the changes are made in the local environment.

1. Nonexisting paths in Path can cause problems.

2. Path Manager is a little utlity that helps with the Path problems.

3. You can prepare a bat file:

   @echo off PATH C:\Python27;%path% title Octopress – %Username%@%Computername% cd C:\Projects\WebProjects\octopress cmd

Which will add the directory you want to be added to the Path. This will be valid for the command session only, and as a bonus can land you right into the directory that you want to work. This solution is the one that I feel more comfortable with.

For a discussion about these recommendations on Stackoverflow see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6318156/adding-python-path-on-windows-7