about_Locations

Short description

Describes how to access items from the working location in PowerShell.

Long description

The current working location is the default location to which commands point. In other words, this is the location that PowerShell uses if you don't supply an explicit path to the item or location that's affected by the command.

Note

PowerShell supports multiple runspaces per process. Each runspace has its own current directory. This isn't the same as the current directory of the PowerShell process: [System.Environment]::CurrentDirectory.

For example, you might set your current working location to the following location:

Set-Location C:\Program Files\Windows PowerShell

As a result, all commands are processed from this location unless another path is explicitly provided.

PowerShell maintains the current working location for each drive even when the drive isn't the current drive. This allows you to access items from the current working location by referring only to the drive of another location. For example, suppose that your current working location is C:\Windows. Now, suppose you use the following command to change your current working location to the HKLM: drive:

Set-Location HKLM:

Although your current location is now the registry drive, you can still access items in the C:\Windows directory using the C: drive, as shown in the following example:

Get-ChildItem C:

PowerShell remembers that your current working location for that drive is the Windows directory, so it retrieves items from that directory. The results would be the same if you ran the following command:

Get-ChildItem C:\Windows

In PowerShell, you can use the Get-Location command to determine the current working location, and you can use the Set-Location command to set the current working location. For example, the following command sets the current working location to the Windows directory of the C: drive:

Set-Location C:\Windows

After you set the current working location, you can still access items from other drives by including the drive name (followed by a colon) in the command, as shown in the following example:

Get-ChildItem HKLM:\software

The example command retrieves a list of items in the Software container of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive in the registry.

PowerShell also allows you to use special characters to represent the current working location and its parent location. To represent the current working location, use a single period. To represent the parent of the current working location, use two periods. For example, the following specifies the System subdirectory in the current working location:

Get-ChildItem .\System

If the current working location is C:\Windows, this command returns a list of all the items in C:\Windows\System. However, if you use two periods, the parent directory of the current working directory is used, as shown in the following example:

Get-ChildItem ..\"Program Files"

In this case, PowerShell treats the two periods as the C: drive, so the command retrieves all the items in the C:\Program Files directory.

A path beginning with a backslash (\) identifies a path from the root of the current drive. For example, if your current working location is C:\Program Files\PowerShell, the root of your drive is C:\. Therefore, the following command lists all items in the C:\Windows directory:

Get-ChildItem \Windows

If you don't specify a path beginning with a drive name, backslash (\), or period (.) when supplying the name of a container or item, the container or item is assumed to be located in the current working location. For example, if your current working location is C:\Windows, the following command returns all the items in the C:\Windows\System directory:

Get-ChildItem System

If you specify a filename rather than a directory name, PowerShell returns details about that file (assuming that file is located in the current working location).

See also