Professional Windows® PowerShell

19.6. Creating Custom Drives

If you are working on the command line, it can be time-consuming, tedious, and error prone to type something like

cd "c:\My Documents\Test Scripts\PowerShell Book"

time after time. Tab completion makes the process easier, but you still have to use the Tab key and arrows keys Windows PowerShell allows you to create a custom drive, let's call it book, so that you can simply type

cd book:

and you will be in the directory that you want to be in.

In this example, I will show you how to create a custom drive. First, you will use Windows PowerShell to create a directory structure. To do that, use these commands (assuming that your current location is in the root folder of drive C:.

new-item "My Documents" -Type Directory
cd "My Documents"
new-item "Test Scripts" -Type Directory
cd "Test Scripts"
new-item "PowerShell Book" -Type Directory
cd "PowerShell Book"

As you can see in Figure 19-22, information about each new folder is displayed as it is created.

Figure 19.22. Figure 19-22

To create the new drive called Book and display some of its properties, use the following command:

new-psdrive -Name Book -PSProvider FileSystem -Root "C:\My Documents\Test
Scripts\PowerShell Book" |
format-list

Be careful not to include a colon character in the drive name in the preceding command. The value of the Provider parameter specifies that the FileSystem provider is used ...