PowerShell 101, Lesson 6

In this case, Get-PSDrive returns a list of drives associated with the Registry provider.

After you know what drives are available, you can access those drives within your commands. For example, you can change your working location to the Env drive with the statement

cd Env:\

This statement uses the cd alias to reference the Set-Location cmdlet. Figure 3 shows how the command prompt now reflects the new location. Once in that folder, you can run other PowerShell commands, such as

dir | where {$_.Name -like “*path*”}

In this command, I use the dir alias to reference the Get-ChildItem cmdlet, then filter out all variable names that don’t contain the string path. The results in Figure 3 show that the Get-ChildItem cmdlet works the same as if this were a file-system drive.

You can access any drive type from any other drive type. For example, the following statement retrieves a list of objects in the HKCU drive:

dir HKCU:\

As you can see in Figure 4, Env is still my working location, but the results are pulled from the HKCU drive.

You can also change to any drive type from any drive type. For example, the following command changes the working location to a registry key:

cd HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\

As this command shows, not only can you change to a different drive, but you can also change to folders within that drive, whether it’s in the registry, the file system, or another hierarchical data store. In this case, I’ve set the working location to HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\Microsoft\Office.

It also doesn’t matter whether you access data through different providers or the same provider. For example, the following statement retrieves information from a registry key in a different hive:

dir HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Office\

By using PowerShell drives, you can jump from location to location without taking any special steps, as shown in Figure 5.

To view specific information about an item such as a registry key, you can use the Get-ItemProperty cmdlet. The following statement retrieves information about the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software Microsoft\ASP.NET key:

Get-ItemProperty `
HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\ASP.NET

As you can see in Figure 6, the statement retrieves a list of properties and their values. Notice that the results also include Power- Shell-specific information, such as the name of the PowerShell drive and provider.

Besides using the PowerShell built-in drives to retrieve data, you can use them to take any action applicable to the data store. For example, you can use the New-Item cmdlet to create an object in the registry:

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