Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

Introduction to providers

Providers in PowerShell present access to data that is not normally easily accessible. There are providers for the filesystem, registry, certificate store, and so on. Each provider arranges data so that it resembles a filesystem.

PowerShell Core: What happened to provider help? PowerShell Core does not include Provider help files. Help may be viewed either online or in Windows PowerShell.

A longer description of Providers may be seen by viewing the about file:

Get-Help about_Providers

The list of providers available in the current PowerShell session may be viewed by running Get-PSProvider, as shown in the following example:

PS> Get-PSProvider  Name           Capabilities                       Drives ----           ------------                       ------ Registry ShouldProcess, ...