PowerShell: Path Expansion

Path Expansion

Some characters have special meaning in the value of Path parameter.

• Tilde ~ at beginning → Same as $home
• Period . at beginning → Current dir. Same as (Get-Location)
• Two Periods .. at beginning → Parent dir.
• Asterisk * → String Wildcards

Path is expanded to fullpath or multiple paths.

Double quoted path goes thru String Expansion first, then go thru path expansion. To not go thru path expansion, use parameter LiteralPath .

Get Expanded Path Value

To see what a given path expand to, use Resolve-Path.

Resolve-Path

Resolves the wildcard characters in a path, prints result.

return a single object of PathInfo, or array of it. (return a string or array of string if Relative parameter is used.)

$x = Resolve-Path ~/
Write-Host $x
# C:\Users\xah

$x = Resolve-Path "~/Documents/*"

Write-Host $x -separator "`n"

<#
C:\Users\xah\Documents\PowerShell
C:\Users\xah\Documents\PowerToys
C:\Users\xah\Documents\Sound recordings
C:\Users\xah\Documents\Wolfram Mathematica
#>