PSDrives and PSProviders

In PowerShell, there are different PSProviders available. But what is a PowerShell provider, exactly? It is a representation of a data storage location, where you are able to use basic commands regarding specific data types. For example, FileSystem is the PSProvider, when working in the context of the filesystem. As you can see in the following table, this is available in the standard PSDrive. In this context, you work directly with the built-in cmdlets directed to this data store. A good example is Get-ChildItem, which retrieves the child items of the current location in the current PSDrive. When working in the filesystem, the types are files and directories, but in the certificate PSDrive, they will be the available certificates. The following table shows all of the available PSDrives with their corresponding PSProvider, which are available by default:

PSProvider	PSDrive	Data Store
Alias	Alias:	PowerShell aliases
Certificate	Cert:	x509 certificates for digital signatures...