Getting help about providers

PowerShell Help
1

The help for about_provider mentions that we can run get-help to get more info about a specific provider.

For example, get-help certificate.

However, when I run get-help for any provider listed under get-psprovider, I do not get any results.

Why is that?

Even when I run get-help -category Provider, I get an error message indicateing that get-help could not find the provider, in this case filesystem, in a help file.

I have run update-help to troubleshoot.

Here’s the output I get when running get-help filesystem:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> get-help filesystem

NAME
Get-SupportedFileSystems

SYNTAX
Get-SupportedFileSystems

ALIASES
None

REMARKS
None

2

I can duplicate what you are seeing on the certificate provider has a help file response from get-help

but the providers do have help files and this command will give you the info

Get-PSProvider|select Name, HelpFile

The files will be in C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\en-US

Wait, I actually searched the System.Management.Automation.dll-Help.xml and some of the providers like filesystem do not have topics. It looks like you may have to fall back the the msdn documentation https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.powershell.commands.filesystemprovider(v=vs.85).aspx

3

What version of PowerShell are you running and what version of Windows.

I’m using Windows 10 Insider Preview build 14332 and the provider help works as I would expect

PS> get-help -Category Provider

Name                              Category  Module                    Synopsis
----                              --------  ------                    --------
Registry                          Provider  Microsoft.PowerShell.Core Provides access to the syste...
Alias                             Provider  Microsoft.PowerShell.Core Provides access to the Windo...
Environment                       Provider  Microsoft.PowerShell.Core Provides access to the Windo...
FileSystem                        Provider  Microsoft.PowerShell.Core Provides access to files and...
Function                          Provider  Microsoft.PowerShell.Core Provides access to the funct...
Variable                          Provider  Microsoft.PowerShell.Core Provides access to the Windo...
Certificate                       Provider                            Provides access to X.509 cer...
4

I am duplicating the issue on Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview build 14295

5

I’m able to reproduce the issue across 1511, 14295, and 14332.

The 1511 build is on my host OS and the 14295 and 14332 builds are from a VM.

How did you search for the help file XML for the provider topic? This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on this XML.

The help topic does have information about the certificate and environment providers, but it does not have information about the other providers, such as registry, alias, function, and variable.