Providers

Providers in PowerShell present access to data that is not normally easily accessible. There are providers for the filesystem, registry, certificate store, and so on. Each provider arranges data so that it resembles a filesystem.

A longer description of Providers may be seen by viewing the about file:

Get-Help about_Providers

The list of providers available in the current PowerShell session may be viewed by running Get-PSProvider, as shown in the following example:

PS> Get-PSProvider

Name           Capabilities                       Drives 
----           ------------                       ------ 
Registry       ShouldProcess, Transactions        {HKLM, HKCU}
Alias          ShouldProcess                      {Alias} 
Environment    ShouldProcess                      {Env} 
FileSystem     Filter, ShouldProcess, Credentials {C, D} 
Function       ShouldProcess                      {Function} 
Variable       ShouldProcess                      {Variable}
Certificate    ShouldProcess...