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I'm done with installing Pycharm, and throughout the wizard, there was a tickbox saying: add to PATH (restart required).

What extra benefit would I get from ticking that box?

Alex Deft
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  • Possible duplicate of [How to use PYTHONPATH](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19917492/how-to-use-pythonpath) – Kushan Gunasekera Jul 08 '19 at 07:02
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    As with adding any executable's location to your path (or vice versa), you'd be able to invoke it by name alone, without providing the full path. – jonrsharpe Jul 08 '19 at 07:03

2 Answers2

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Very short answer, somebody can provide details also I am not an expert.

If in windows, adding to path is like adding the program to the environment variables. This means, that instead of executing it to the full path where the .exe is you could call it with an "alias".

To run python, instead of going somewhere like C:/Program Files/Python/python.exe you could simply type "python".

Alejandro A
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I don't think PyCharm will want you to put itself in PATH (aside from the charm helper maybe, which launches the IDE akin to subl or code for Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code respectively).

Having Python in PATH (I recall the installer does ask that on Windows) will make it possible for you to run python, pip and the other tools from any directory when using the command line.

AKX
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