PowerShell providers are .NET programs that enables us to access
and manage specialized Windows data stores.
Now, when I say specialized data stores,
it means data other than files,
folders, and documents that resides on a hard drive or shared network path.
Operating system data like Windows Registry, certificate stores play a
significant role in managing OS‑related operations.
PS providers provides a convenient way to access and manage this kind of data.
PS providers enables this data to appear as if they are
stored on a drive and access them just like you would access
a file or a folder on a disk drive.
The data in the provider drive can be managed by built‑in commands.
The built‑in commands can also have custom parameters based on
the type of provider that is being accessed.
For example,
while in the cert provider, which is the PS provider for accessing certificates,
if you run Get‑Item command,
you will see an additional parameter, CodeSigningCert. You won't see this
parameter while accessing other provider data like registry or filesystem.
We'll quickly switch to PowerShell console window and check these
PowerShell providers. In this demo, we'll discover the default PowerShell
providers that are available to us.
I am in the PowerShell console window, and we'll quickly see PowerShell version.
Here, we can see that the OS is Windows 10, and PowerShell
Core version is 7.1.3. I'll clear the screen now. To get the
list of PowerShell providers, I'll run get‑psprovider command.
This will list all default providers that are available on the
system. Here, you can see Drives property under which you can see PS drives associated with each provider.