Professional Windows® PowerShell

9.1. Windows PowerShell Providers

Access to data stores in Windows PowerShell depends on providers. As mentioned earlier, a provider is a .NET program that allows you to access data in a data store, then display or manipulate it.

To find the providers available on a machine, use the get-psprovider cmdlet. To find all available providers, simply type:

get-psprovider

To display an alphabetical list of PowerShell providers, type:

get-psprovider | sort-object name

Figure 9-1 shows the names, capabilities and drives of the built-in PowerShell providers.

Figure 9.1. Figure 9-1

The following table summarizes the data stores supported by the built-in providers.

Provider	Data Store
Alias	Windows PowerShell aliases
Certificate	X509 certificates for digital signatures
Environment	Windows environment variables
FileSystem	File system drives, folders (directories) and files
Function	Windows PowerShell functions
Registry	Windows registry
Variable	Windows PowerShell variables

Broadly, each provider supports display of its data similar to how a traditional Windows command shell would display file system data. However, there are differences in detail. For example, the Alias provider does not (need to) support hierarchical data, since there is no concept of a folder of aliases.

Built-in Windows PowerShell providers are contained in snapins (which may also contain cmdlets). The built-in providers are contained ...