Is it possible to set a environment variable at the system level from a command prompt in Windows 7 (or even XP for that matter). I am running from an elevated command prompt.
When I use the set command (set name=value), the environment variable seems to be only valid for the session of the command prompt.
For XP, I used a (free/donateware) tool called "RAPIDEE" (Rapid Environment Editor), but SETX is definitely sufficient for Win 7 (I did not know about this before).
SetX is the command that you'll need in most of the cases.Though its possible to use REG or REGEDIT
Using registry editing commands you can avoid some of the restrictions of the SetX command - different data types, variables containing = in their name and so on.
@echo off
:: requires admin elevated permissions
::setting system variable
REG ADD "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment" /v MyVar /D MyVal
::expandable variable
REG ADD "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment" /T REG_EXPAND_SZ /v MyVar /D MyVal
:: does not require admin permissions
::setting user variable
REG ADD "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment" /v =C: /D "C:\\test"
REG is the pure registry client but its possible also to import the data with REGEDIT though it allows using only hard coded values (or generation of a temp files). The example here is a hybrid file that contains both batch code and registry data (should be saved as .bat - mind that in batch ; are ignored as delimiters while they are used as comments in .reg files):
REGEDIT4
; @ECHO OFF
; CLS
; REGEDIT.EXE /S "%~f0"
; EXIT
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment]
"SystemVariable"="GlobalValue"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Environment]
"UserVariable"="SomeValue"