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Using the Get-PSProvider Cmdlet

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Listing Your Installed Windows PowerShell Providers

Among other things, Windows PowerShell providers determine which data stores you can navigate through. For example, you can use the Get-ChildItem command to retrieve a list of all the files found in a folder; that’s because a provider exists for the file system. You can also use Get-ChildItem to retrieve a list of all the subkeys found in a registry key. Why? You got it: because a provider exists for the registry.

To determine the providers available for you, simply call the Get-PSProvider cmdlet without any parameters:

Get-PSProvider

What you’ll get back is - surprise, surprise - information about your Windows PowerShell providers:

Name                 Capabilities                  Drives
----                 ------------                  ------
Alias                ShouldProcess                 {Alias}
Environment          ShouldProcess                 {Env}
FileSystem           Filter, ShouldProcess         {C, D, E}
Function             ShouldProcess                 {Function}
Registry             ShouldProcess                 {HKLM, HKCU}
Variable             ShouldProcess                 {Variable}
Certificate          ShouldProcess                 {cert}