android' is not recognized as an internal or external command

Question

I'm trying to get the new GCM service to work for me, so I've been following the demo as described here: http://developer.android.com/guide/google/gcm/demo.html

So far, everything works well. However, I'm supposed to build the ant files using the command line now, and that's where things stop working.

For some reason, this command $ android update project --name GCMDemo -p . --target android-16 gives me a very nice

'android' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. 

Normally this can be fixed easily with a quick Google search, but I haven't found a single other user with this problem. Could someone tell me what the problem is? My educated guess is that I need to add the Android tools folder to my PATH, but I'd rather be sure first.

Answer 1

Your guess is correct, just add the folder containing android.bat(tools folder) to the PATH. Otherwise the system will not be able to find the program.

Other possibility is change directory (using cd) to the tools folder, and execute the command from there. Since the current directory (whatever it is) is usually in the PATH, the system will find it. But this is not handy, because you frequently want to execute this command being in a different directory.

Answer 2

Find android.bat on your system. On mine (win 8 x64) it's under C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\tools\android.bat

Open a command console, and use the 'doskey' command:

doskey android=C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\tools\android.bat $* 

This will continue to work in the open command console. To make it permanent is more difficult: http://darkforge.blogspot.com/2010/08/permanent-windows-command-line-aliases.html

You can also try adding it to your PATH as another poster suggested, but that didn't work for me. I recommend an easy gui for doing it, such as https://patheditor2.codeplex.com/