Jimmy Z » fix http://jimmyzimmerman.com/blog Web Entrepreneur Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:55:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Windows XP PATH not interpreting environment variables http://jimmyzimmerman.com/blog/2008/12/windows-xp-path-not-interpreting-environment-variables.html http://jimmyzimmerman.com/blog/2008/12/windows-xp-path-not-interpreting-environment-variables.html#comments Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:17:30 +0000 Jimmy'z http://jimmyzimmerman.com/blog/?p=231 This one took me a while to figure out. I have my PATH environment variable set up to include other paths that are also defined by an environment variable. For example, I have Maven set up in the following way:


M2_HOME = C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\apache-maven-2.0.9
M2 = %M2_HOME%\bin
PATH = %M2%;[a whole lot of other dirs]

Today, I tried to run a Maven build, and it wasn’t recognizing the maven\bin in my path. When I did an echo on my path, the path had the following:

%M2%;C:\Program Files...

instead of

C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\apache-maven-2.0.9\bin

which would be the value of %M2%

When I did:

echo %M2%

I got the full path C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\apache-maven-2.0.9\bin

What was going on?

Well, apparently, Windows has a limit on the size of your path and when it hits that limit, it just stops interpreting your %VARIABLES% set in the path.

So, the solution is to either reorganize all of your files into more succinctly named directories, or remove some of the dirs from your path.

Thanks M$. Hope this helps someone else.

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