RE: [h-e-w] How to tell (windows) emacs whichftp.exe,ediff.exe,grep.exe... files to use

[Eli Daniel]

There is a lot of complicated-sounding advice flying around, but there's a
very simple solution too: just add your unix tools to your windows path.

In Win2k, that means right-clicking on "My Computer", going to "Properties",
clicking the "Advanced" tab, and then the "Environment Variables" button.
You can then add a variable called PATH to the "User variables" section if
there isn't one there yet.  This is a semicolon-separated list of
directories to look in for executables.  Just add the location of your unix
binaries to this list.

That's it.  No modifying your .emacs file, no modifying the way to start
Emacs.  Emacs should be able to just use diff, grep, and so on just like you
were on a unix machine.  And as a bonus, these utilities will now be in your
path so that you can use them from a DOS prompt too.

-Eli