PowerShell Providers

PowerShell exposes a number of “providers” as “drives”, which allows us to view certain data in a manner that resembles a file system drive, i.e. we can use operations like ls and cat on them (ish).

To list the available providers:

PS ~> Get-PSProvider

Name           Capabilities                          Drives
----           ------------                          ------
Alias          ShouldProcess                         {Alias}
Environment    ShouldProcess                         {Env}
FileSystem     Filter, ShouldProcess, Credentials    {Temp, /}
Function       ShouldProcess                         {Function}
Variable       ShouldProcess                         {Variable}

Windows only:

• HKLM:, HKCU: access registry hives under the Registry provider
• Cert: to manipulate the system X.509 certificate store

They can be accessed like filesystem objects in PowerShell, e.g. gci alias, get-item alias:gci, get-content alias:gci.

Examples

• the Alias provider exposes the Alias: drive: ```powershell PS ~> gci alias: CommandType Name Version Source ———– —- ——- —— Alias ? -> Where-Object
  Alias % -> ForEach-Object
  Alias cd -> Set-Location
  Alias chdir -> Set-Location
  Alias clc -> Clear-Content
  Alias clhy -> Clear-History
  Alias cli -> Clear-Item
  Alias clp -> Clear-ItemProperty
  Alias cls -> Clear-Host

equivalent to Get-Alias gci

PS ~> Get-Item alias:gci

CommandType Name Version Source ———– —- ——- —— Alias gci -> Get-ChildItem
```

• gci function:,alias: we can list multiple “drives”
• get-content function:Get-GitStatus (from the posh-git module)
• remove-item alias:curl -force
• Items inside providers can also be accessed through variables. $env:path denotes the path key inside the env: provider (i.e. an environment variable); $alias:cd for the cd alias
• $function:countdown returns the ScriptBlock assigned to a function named countdown
• For function names with symbols (like most functions following PowerShell naming conventions), use ${function:Clear-Host} variable syntax
• Custom providers can be created

msdocs

the alias provider the function provider