By popular demand, I uploaded a bunch of my scripts to my SkyDrive. Included are:

• Set Powershell Home – this is actually a zip file that contains the profile redirect script. Unzip this in your Documents folder and change the path in Microsoft.PowerShell_profile to where ever you want your profile and home directories to live.
• _profile – my “real” profile script. Note, the su function requires the Script Elevation PowerToys in order to work. Also, all the various aliases are hard coded to their location on my machine. You’ll probably want to change them.
• prompt – my prompt script
• prepend-path – a script to add a directory to start of my path
• append-path – like above, but adds the directory to the end of the path
• append-path-perm – like append-path, but permanently updates the path in the registry

Enjoy.

Since folks were interested in my favorite tools, I thought I’d blog how I have PowerShell configured. I’m not an ultra-power user, but I hold my own and hopefully you can use some of this configuration for yourself. Please tell me you’re not still using CMD.

First, I use a trick I picked up from Tomas Restrepo to change your home directory and profile script. Here’s my Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 file (in the WindowsPowerShell subdirectory of My Documents)

# reset $HOME and $PROFILE variables
set-variable -name HOME -value "D:HPierson.Files" -force  
(get-psprovider FileSystem).Home = $HOME  
set-variable -name Profile -Value "$HomeScripts_profile.ps1"

# Run the $PROFILE script
. $profile

By default, PS uses the user’s personal directory (c:usershpierson in my case) as the home directory and the aforementioned filename for the profile script. Personally, I like to keep all “real” data off my boot partition so that I don’t have to back it all up when I repave. So my “real” home location is d:HPierson.Files. The above script sets both the $HOME variable and file system home property to this directory. It also resets the $PROFILE variable to a script in my $homeScripts folder and runs it.

My $PROFILE script does several things of note:

• It adds the aforementioned $homeScripts folder to the path. My utilities folder is a permanent part of the path, put I only add the scripts folder when I’m actually running PS.
• If I’m running as administrator, I set the background color of the console window to red. I think I picked up this script from Brad Wilson at some point.
• Set location to home, otherwise when I start PS as admin, it starts in c:winsys32.
• I have a simple prompt script file that displays current folder, the current command number and a list of yellow plus signs indicating how deep I am in the directory stack. To get it to work, I have to remove the standard prompt function, which I do in $PROFILE.
• I can’t ever remember the space between “cd” and “..”, so I wrote a simple function called “cd..” that executes “cd ..”.
• I have a su function that leverages the Script Elevation PowerToys. If you pass in a command, it executes it with elevated credentials. If you just execute su, it runs an elevated PowerShell.
• I use 7-zip for my compression needs, including the 7za command line app. However, PS has issues w/ executing an exe that starts with a number. So I aliased 7za as “zip”. Update: Tomas points out that you can prepend an ampersand to force execution, so I could have typed “&7za”. I forgot that when I created the alias and am now used to using zip, so I’m not going to change it. But I thought you should know.
• I have an ever-changing set of aliases, depending on my needs. Currently, I alias “ipy”, “cpy”, “fsi”, “fsc”, “devenv” and “chiron” to their fully path-qualified equivalents, so I can run them from anywhere without having to add their respective folders to the path.

I don’t set vsvars in the $profile script, but I do have a copy of the one Chris Tavares wrote in my scripts folder, so I can set up a VS environment in a moments’ notice.

Also, I put PowerShell on the Vista quick launch bar, so I can bring it up by typing Win-2.