Professional Windows® PowerShell

Chapter 9. Retrieving and Working with Data

Windows PowerShell allows you readily to access, retrieve, and manipulate data from a range of drives, files, and other data containers. Access to data stores in Windows PowerShell is founded on providers. A provider is a .NET program that makes available data from a data store and supports viewing and manipulation of that data.

In this chapter, I introduce you to several cmdlets that are relevant to exploring data stores and retrieving and manipulating data from them.

One of the differences between the Windows and the Linux families of operating systems is that Windows and Windows applications store system information in a huge variety of formats. In Linux, a lot of information is stored as text and, if you have the appropriate text utilities and the skills to use them, you can access a lot of system information by simply manipulating text. In Windows, you have system information stored in stores such as the registry and Active Directory. Text utilities just won't cut it. Windows PowerShell provides, and needs, a range of providers that allow you to access and manipulate objects that represent a variety of data stores.