Exploring the Certificate Provider: Step-by-Step Exercises | MicrosoftВ® Windows PowerShell(TM) Step By Step (Step By Step (Microsoft))

In this exercise, we explore the use of the Certificate provider in Windows PowerShell.

Start Windows PowerShell.
Obtain a listing of all the properties available for use with the Get-ChildItem cmdlet by piping the results into the Get-Member cmdlet. To filter out only the properties, pipeline the results into a Where-Object cmdlet and specify the membertype to be equal to property. This command is shown here:
```
 Get-ChildItem |Get-Member | Where-Object {$_.membertype -eq "property"}
```
Set your location to the certificate drive. To identify the certificate drive, use the Get-PSDrive cmdlet. Use the Where-Object cmdlet and filter on names that begin with the letter c. This is shown here:
```
 Get-PSDrive |where {$_.name -like "c*"}
```

The results of this command are shown here:

 Name       Provider      Root                                   CurrentLocation ----       --------      ----                                   --------------- C          FileSystem    C:\ cert       Certificate   \

Use the Set-Location cmdlet to change to the certificate drive.
```
 Sl cert:\
```
Use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet to produce a listing of all the certificates on the machine.
```
 GCI
```

The output from the previous command is shown here:

 Location   : CurrentUser StoreNames : {?, UserDS, AuthRoot, CA...} Location   : LocalMachine StoreNames : {?, AuthRoot, CA, AddressBook...}

The listing seems somewhat incomplete. To determine whether there are additional certificates installed on the machine, use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet again, but this time specify the recurse argument. Modify the previous command by using the up arrow. The command is shown here:
```
 GCI -recurse
```
The output from the previous command seems to take a long time to run and produces hundreds of lines of output. To make the listing more readable, pipe the output to a text file, and then open the file in Notepad. The command to do this is shown here:
```
 GCI -recurse >C:\a.txt;notepad.exe a.txt
```
This concludes this step-by-step exercise.