Identifying the Providers

By identifying the providers installed with Windows PowerShell, we can begin to understand the capabilities intrinsic to a default installation. Providers expose information contained in different data stores by using a drive and file system analogy. An example of this is obtaining a listing of registry keys-to do this, you would connect to the registry “drive” and use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet, which is exactly the same method you would use to obtain a listing of files on the hard drive. The only difference is the specific name associated with each drive. Providers can be created by anyone familiar with Windows .NET programming. When a new provider is created, it is called a snap-in. A snap-in is a dynamic link library (dll) file that must be installed into Windows PowerShell. After a snap-in has been installed, it cannot be un-installed-however, the snap-in can be removed from the current Windows PowerShell console.

Just the Steps 

To obtain a listing of all the providers, use the Get-PSProvider cmdlet. Example: get-psprovider. This command produces the following list on a default installation of the Windows PowerShell:

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