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:

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

Examples

equivalent to Get-Alias gci

PS ~> Get-Item alias:gci

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

the alias provider the function provider