(file under: interesting info that's difficult to Google)
If you're like me*†, you download a huge amount of open-source and free utilities that don't have installers, write a bunch of batch files and scripts to automate common tasks, and use cmd.exe constantly‡. So, you're setting up a new VirtualPC image, and you know you want to have the Sysinternals utilities on your new machine €, but you don't want to re-download them and you don't know where the heck you unzipped them to. Where oh where could pslist.exe be? Wait, you're an old Unix guy. When you want to know where in your path an executable file is, you say "which".
Gladly, the great Raymond Chen solved your problem years ago, though you didn't know it till now:
@for %%e in (%PATHEXT%) do @for %%i in (%1%%e) do @if NOT "%%~$PATH:i"=="" echo %%~$PATH:i
Paste this line into a file in your Windows directory (or elsewhere in your path; c:\scripts or something like that), save as "which.bat" (or "whereis.bat" if you're not really an old Unix guy and you've just been pretending up till now). Use like so: "which pslist". To which it replies "c:\Program Files\Sysinternals\pslist.exe". Simple as that.
Talk to you next season!
*alive! All recent appearances to the contrary.
† and I realize you probably aren't, aside from being alive
‡ I tried getting into PowerShell a few times, and I'm sure I'll eventually end up there, but at some of the basic shell commands, it's just not fast enough for me. I sometimes do this cycle 20 times in a minute:
cd [beginning of dir] [tab-to-complete] [enter]
dir /od
cd [other dir beginning][tab-to-complete][enter]
I just cant wait 5 seconds (every single time.) for PowerShell to "Get-ChildItem" when it would have taken 1 second for cmd.exe to "dir".
€ (yes, €) You may not have known that you know you want the Sysinternals Suite until now. I'm glad I could be part of your self-discovery process.