The Purpose of Powershell Providers

Robert Cain explains what providers do in Powershell:

Providers are an interesting concept in PowerShell. A provider allows us to use a standard method to communicate with different areas of your computer using the same set of commands. For example, the file system is accessed using a provider. When you use Get-ChildItem it goes through the file system provider to return a list of the files on your computer.

We’ll take a deeper look in a moment, but first let me mention that for all of the examples we’ll display the code, then under it the result of our code. In this article I’ll be using PowerShell Core, 7.1.5, and VSCode. The examples should work in PowerShell 5.1 in the PowerShell IDE, although they’ve not been tested there.

Click through for a listing of several providers and more detail on two of them.