Providers

Abstract

Did you know that PowerShell has no concept of files or folders? That’s why all the operations that involve files and folders seem to be referring to items: Get-Item, Get-ChildItem, Get-ItemProperties. When I first saw that dir was actually an alias for Get-ChildItem, I screamed. I felt as if the cmdlet naming convention has been conceived by a really sick mind. But, later as I was learning more about the shell, I found out that the reasoning behind the item concept is that PowerShell works with all types of objects that look like files. Instead of taking the UNIX shells’ approach and calling everything a file, even things that are obviously not files, the language designers have come up with the item concept.