I just discovered a mechanism in Windows 10 of which I did not know before. I have two Python environments installed on my system. Both are user installation (their executable lieing in AppData).
I tried to run a Program in the system32 Folder (via subprocess.Popen) and discovered that it could not be found by my script. Then I tried to list the whole folder using different methods and discovered that about half of the executables are hidden (even though they exist). The method by which I list the directory (either cmd /k dir ... or powershell -Command Get-ChildItem ... or executing them directly) does not matter the files are hidden, when trying to access them via my python3.12 environment.
Funnily using the python3.11 environment (also a user installation). I do not run into any of those problems.
Here is a diff comparison where you can see which executables are hidden in my python 3.12 installation. (Generated by powershell -Command Get-ChildItem -Name C:\Windows\System32\*.exe).
Does anyone know what mechanism could be at play here?
