Using PSDrives to create shortcuts in the filesystem

Powershell provides and abstraction layer in the form of PowerShell Providers. These keep the shell separate from the resource that is exposed by the provider. We can access these resources with PSDrives and then through the abstraction we can access not just filesystems with drive letters but also the registry, databases or the AD using the same cmdlets that we use in the filesystem. Before we start looking at accessing the Registry with PowerShell Provides and PSDrives will will show their use in accessing directories that my have complex or long paths.We can list PSDrives with

Get-PSDrive

We can create new drives with

New-PSDrive -name etc -psprovider FileSystem -root "c:windowssystem32driversetc"

Now we can access the directory with

cd etc: