Am at a complete loss with this one. Recently a number of my powershell scripts have started failing as they are unable to find the command dnscmd.exe.
What has me at a loss is that the executable exists and works and I can run it just fine in the command prompt. I have tried the following in powershell to run the command:
- dnscmd
- & dnscmd
- & dnscmd.exe
- & c:\windows\system32\dnscmd.exe
All return "The term dnscmd is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function,script file or operable program…."
Can anyone enlighten me as to why powershell is completely unable to see the command, where the normal command prompt/windows explorer etc.. can? Using powershell 2.
Best Answer
This sounds like the work of the File System Redirector to me. Are you running on a 64bit OS?
For example, when you make a call to C:\Windows\system32\dnscmd.exe on a 64bit OS using PowerShell (x86), this will be redirected to C:\Windows\SysWow64\dnscmd.exe. The redirection occurs at the point the folder is accessed so even though you are explicitly providing the path to the executable, you'll still be diverted. This can be disabled on the current thread via calls to native Windows APIs or can be avoided through the use of certain variables and aliases.
More information here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384187%28VS.85%29.aspx