An Introduction to PowerShell - Profile

PowerShell is a great way to automate almost anything in Windows.

However, it’s not just a scripting language.

If you find yourself using it as a command line shell it may be useful to store your functions and customizations in a profile that gets loaded every time you load the Console.

The first thing we do here is check if we already have a profile. There is an automatic variable, $Profile, that stores the fully qualified location of the PowerShell profile. An easy way to check if any profile exists is to use the Test-Path cmdlet on the $Profile variable.

Test-Path $Profile

As you can see no profile file yet created for me, so we will create one, we can easily do that with the New-Item cmdlet.

New-Item –Path $Profile –Type File –Force

Using the force parameter will cause a profile to be created even if already we have one. This means our old profile will be overwritten and new will be created.



Profile can be edit using notepad, which can be easily started using PowerShell.

notepad $Profile

You can put any commands, functions, alias’s and even module imports into your PowerShell profile.

I normally work on PowerShell for Navision so I would prefer loading module whenever I launch the PowerShell command, so I include my cmdlets for loading the same in my profile.



Save the Profile and close the PowerShell. Next time I launch PowerShell this Module get loaded for me by default.

Finally, I would like to also have some customizations to the console. One is it basically determines if you have opened an elevated PowerShell console and changes the font colour, this way I will always remember that I am running with elevated privileges.

Let us Save the Profile and check the effect of this Profile.



That’s all for today.

I will come up with more stuffs in my upcoming posts.

Till then keep practicing and stay tuned for more details.