21 June 2007 in Code, Tools | Comments enabled

Earlier this year I was tooling around with PowerShell and generally having a fun time with it and, based on a comment from Andrew, decided to see how difficult it would be to write a PowerShell Drive Provider. A drive provider is a mechanism of allowing you to navigate any store with the same commands as navigating the file system. PowerShell ships with several providers already, a registry and certificate store. This means you are able to “cd” into your registry and write commands like “dir” or “ls” on a node and get a list of all the children for example.

The attached download includes working commented code and a detailed tutorial PDF on how to write a drive provider that will enable you to mount a zip file as a drive and then navigate through it. This is powerful for removing the need to extract and then navigate files quickly and easily. I’ve implemented it in a simplistic manner and there is plenty of room for additional features but I wanted to keep it simple for educational purposes. Note that you will need PowerShell installed to even compile as it relies on several assemblies that ship with PowerShell.

So if you find yourself lying awake at night wishing you could mount zip files as drives within PowerShell (don’t we all?) or just want to learn more about writing drive providers or managed plug-ins for PowerShell then check this out.

Download the PowerShell Zip Drive Provider and Tutorial

Hope this helps people have more of a poke at PowerShell,

– JD