A
provider allows PowerShell to connect to data sources (aka data stores) as though they were file systems. Therefore, providers are especially useful if the
data is hierarchical in nature, like, for example
Providers, items, locations and drives
A provider is called «provider» because it provides the
PowerShell environment, notably the
location and
childItem cmdLet
nouns the possibilty to access «locations» and «items».
A provider implements one or more
drives each of which contains a (hierarchical) tree.
Within a drive, the data itself is located and accessed by a
path.
Cmdlets
In order to read, write or delete data in a data store, a
data item is needed. Such an element represents, for example, a file, a directory or a
registry key.
Each of this items is associated with and stored in hierarchically structured location, think file system path. The
location cmdLet noun allows to change the current location.
Items are also associated with properties, for example the file creation date in a drive-provider. These properties can be modified with the
itemProperty cmdLet noun.
Because the locations are organized in trees, an item's child items are found with the
childItem cmdLet noun.
The
path noun deals with the textual representation of locations and wildcard operations.
cmdlets related to providers are
-
get-psProvider provides information about a provider
-
get-psDrive provides information about a drive