Set Path for stsadm.exe

I am sure this is nothing new or amazing, but another little thing that has kind of bugged me was always needing to point my command window to the SharePoint BIN folder to get at stsadm.exe to run SharePoint commands and such. Back in the day I would’ve just edited my machine's autoexec.bat and added a SET PATH command to the BIN folder so that it would always be available – but those days are long over ;-)

So after doing a little bit of searching around I figured out how to add a SET PATH in Windows Server 2003. It’s really easy...

1. Open up the system properties window (Right Click My Computer > Properties)
2. Click on the “Advanced” tab
3. Click on the “Environment Variables”
   
   
4. In the “System variables” list, find and select the item named “Path”
   
   
5. Click "Edit"
6. In the “Edit System Variable” window, in the “Variable value” field add a semicolon at the end as a separator and add the path to the SharePoint BIN folder:
   
   C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\
   
   Note: be sure to add the semicolon “;” after the last path and before the new
   
   
7. Hit OK in all the windows and you should be good to go. If you open up a command window and type stsadm you should be able to access it without having to go through the trouble of navigating to the SharePoint BIN folder.