Using providers and PSDrives

Until now, you have only seen cmdlets. Cmdlets are PowerShell commands. PowerShell has another import concept named providers. Providers are accessed through named drives or PSDrives. In the following sections, Using providers and Using PSDrives, providers and PSDrives will be explained.

Using providers

A PowerShell provider is a piece of software that makes datastores look like filesystems. PowerShell providers are usually part of a snap-in or a module-like PowerCLI. The advantage of providers is that you can use the same cmdlets for all the providers. These cmdlets have the following nouns: Item, ChildItem, Content, and ItemProperty. You can use the Get-Command cmdlet to get a list of all the cmdlets with these nouns:

PowerCLI C:> Get-Command -Noun Item,ChildItem,Content,ItemProperty |
Format-Table -AutoSize

The preceding command gives the following output:

CommandType Name                Version Source
----------- ----                ------- ------
Cmdlet...