Using the Get-PSDrive Cmdlet
Listing Your Windows PowerShell Drives
Windows PowerShell maps a number of “drives” that make it easy for you to navigate various namespaces on your computer; by default this includes not only the physical disk drives on your computer but also such things as the registry hives HKEY_CURRENT_USER (drive HKCU) and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (drive HKLM). To return a list of all the Windows PowerShell drives on your machine, simply use the Get-PSDrive cmdlet:
Get-PSDrive
In return, Windows PowerShell will return information similar to this:
Name Provider Root CurrentLocation
---- -------- ---- ---------------
Alias Alias
C FileSystem C:\ ...Settings\kenmyer
cert Certificate \
D FileSystem D:\
E FileSystem E:\
Env Environment
Function Function
HKCU Registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER
HKLM Registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Variable Variable
Alternatively, you might want to pipe these results into the Format-List cmdlet; when you do that, you’ll get back additional information (such as the full provider name) for each drive. That command looks like this:
Get-PSDrive | Format-List
And the returned data will look like this:
Name : Alias
Description : Drive containing a view of the aliases stored in session state.
Provider : Microsoft.Windows PowerShell.Core\Alias
Root :
CurrentLocation :
Name : C
Description :
Provider : Microsoft.Windows PowerShell.Core\FileSystem
Root : C:\
CurrentLocation : Documents and Settings\kenmyer
You can also specify an individual drive name (or use wildcard characters) to return information about a single drive or set of drives. This command returns information for only drive C:
Get-PSDrive c
And this command returns information for the two registry drives (both of which have names starting with the letter H):
Get-PSDrive h*
| Get-PSDrive Aliases |
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