Providers and PSDrives

A provider exposes some hierarchical store as though it were a filesystem. Once it does, the same commands work against it: Get-ChildItem, Get-Item, Set-Location, Test-Path, Remove-Item.

Lesson 2 min read Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7

Documentation: Microsoft Learn

Written and tested by Dhrub Bharali · Updated 02 October 2026

Overview

Windows PowerShell ships providers for the filesystem, the registry, certificates, environment variables, functions, aliases and variables. So Get-ChildItem HKLM:\Software lists registry keys, Get-ChildItem Cert:\LocalMachine\My lists certificates, and Get-ChildItem Env: lists environment variables. You did not learn new commands for any of those.

Get-PSDrive lists the drives each provider offers. C: is a filesystem drive, HKLM: is a registry drive, Cert: is a certificate drive. New-PSDrive adds your own, which is a tidy way to give a long UNC path a short name for the session.

The catch is that output columns change with the provider, because the objects are different. A file has Length and LastWriteTime; a registry key has Property and SubKeyCount. Same cmdlet, different objects, so pipe to Get-Member when you move to an unfamiliar drive.

What happens

Get-PSDrive returns one object per drive with the provider that backs it and the root it maps to. Reading the Provider column is the fastest way to see that C: and HKLM: are the same kind of thing as far as PowerShell is concerned, which is what makes the file commands work on the registry.

Worth remembering

Providers make stores look like drives, so file commands work on them.
Get-ChildItem works on HKLM:, Cert: and Env: as well as C:.
Get-PSDrive lists drives. New-PSDrive adds one.
Output columns differ by provider because the objects differ.

Primary documentation

Select-Object reference

Try it

Browser simulation · fictional data; no changes to your computer.

Command

Interactive simulation · fictional data

Lists the drives available in this session and which provider backs each.

Show reference output

Browser dataset output · the real environment will differ

Name      Provider     Root              
--------  -----------  ------------------
C         FileSystem   C:\               
D         FileSystem   D:\               
HKCU      Registry     HKEY_CURRENT_USER 
HKLM      Registry     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Env       Environment                    
Function  Function                       
Variable  Variable                       
Alias     Alias

Practise this

Choose a task

Find your working directory

Display the current location as a Path object.

Review the lesson

Keep going

Next: Modules