Professional Windows® PowerShell

20.2. Exploring the Registry Using Windows PowerShell

Windows PowerShell makes it relatively straightforward to navigate the two supported registry hives. It allows you to select a registry hive as if it were a drive and then navigate around the hierarchy in the chosen hive as if you were navigating a hierarchy of folders and files.

20.2.1. Selecting a Hive

Navigating to a selected hive is straightforward. To navigate to the HKLM hive, use this command:

set-location HKLM:

or:

cd HKLM:

To navigate to the HKCU hive, use this command:

set-location HKCU:

or:

cd HKCU:

It's important that you include the colon character after the drive name. If you don't, then you'll receive an error message, as shown in Figure 20-3.

Set-Location : Cannot find path 'HKCU:\HKLM' because it does not exist.
At line:1 char:3
+ cd  <<<< HKLM

In the absence of a colon character, what you intend as a drive name is interpreted as a path relative to the current drive.

Figure 20.3. Figure 20-3

20.2.2. Navigating to a Desired Key

Information about how Windows PowerShell is configured to run (or not) scripts is contained in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell key. As you can see in Figure 20-4, this includes the execution policy for Windows PowerShell scripts, set on this particular development machine, to RemoteSigned. Notice that the location of the PowerShell.exe ...