"@php_bin@" is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

After lot of struggle I was able to install the PEAR and PHPCodeSniffer in Xampp (Windows). In this process, I have faced lot of problems to run the PHPCodeSniffer properly. In this process, I found lot of good articles which explained me well from the beginning. But I spent lot of time to fix the error  "@php_bin@ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."

Here is the solution which worked for me I hope it will be useful to others also:

1. First Download PHPCodeSniffer from http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer/download and extract this in your Local directory. In my case I have extracted in xampp/htdocs

2. Find phpcs.bat file that you extracted, open it by using your fav. editor and define 2 variable to set the paths manually.

set phpbin="D:\xampp\php\php.exe" (This is the php.exe path)
set location="D:\xampp\htdocs\PHPCodeSniffer\scripts" (This is the path where phpcs.bat is located)

and replace actual line with below given line
"%phpbin%" -d auto_append_file="" -d auto_prepend_file="" -d include_path="'%phpbin%'" -f "%location%\phpcs" -- %*

3. open command line and execute the phpcs file with the specific .php as a argument. Ex:

> phpcs D:\xampp\htdocs\test.php (add path before phpcs if you did not set the environment variable for phpcs)