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Accepted
Ben Short
Asked: 2010-06-28 17:53:31 +0800 CST

Powershell unable to "see" dnscmd.exe

  • 772

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.

powershell command-line-interface

6 Answers

  1. 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

    • 7

  2. Its the File System Redirect, but you can bypass

    Instead of 

    C:\windows\system32

    (which the redirector will grab) use

    C:\windows\sysnative\dnscmd.exe
    • 4

  3. What do you get when you execute:

    Get-Command dnscmd.exe -CommandType Application

    • 1

  4. This is not very timely, but in Windows 8.1 I have found that it looks for it in System32 but doesn't find it. Strangely it exists on the system, but in the winsxs directory instead. Copying it to System32 allowed it to run as expected. I don't have any explanation as to why this is, but if you hit this issue it may be a workaround for you.

    • 0

  5. I had exact same issue, turns out that I accidently pinned x86 version of PowerShell.

    There is really some magic with File System Redirector going on...

    • 0

  6. just install "DNS server tools" feature. Remote Server Administration Tools -> role based tools -> DNS server tools

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