Why is PowerShell resolving paths from $home instead of the current directory?

Question

I expect this little powershell one liner to echo a full path to foo.txt, where the directory is my current directory.

[System.IO.Path]::GetFullPath(".\foo.txt")

But it's not. It prints...

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\foo.txt

I am not in the $home directory. Why is it resolving there?

Aesthetics

you should be using Resolve-Path within powershell. – Hermaphroditism

On some systems it returns relative to c:\Windows\system32. – Handbreadth

Answer 1

[System.IO.Path] is using the shell process' current directory. You can get the absolute path with the Resolve-Path cmdlet:

Resolve-Path .\foo.txt

Sheritasherj

This behaviour is unintuitive and inconsistent with every other shell-scripting system on the planet. Of course. Thank you StackOverflow users like Shay, for helping us mere humans understand Powershell! – Currier

The drawback of Resolve-Path is that it can resolve only paths that actually exist. – Thurgau

Ah. So to glob or expand a path you plan to create, you can not use it. – Currier

If we want to resolve a path that doesn't exist yet, we can use [System.IO.Path]::Combine((Get-Location), $relativePath). – Rowe

Answer 2

According to the documentation for GetFullPath, it uses the current working directory to resolve the absolute path. The powershell current working directory is not the same as the current location:

PS C:\> [System.IO.Directory]::GetCurrentDirectory()
C:\Documents and Settings\user
PS C:\> get-location

Path
----
C:\

I suppose you could use SetCurrentDirectory to get them to match:

PS C:\> [System.IO.Directory]::SetCurrentDirectory($(get-location))
PS C:\> [System.IO.Path]::GetFullPath(".\foo.txt")
C:\foo.txt

Mccrea

I have my prompt function do this, updating the current working directory. – Gambrill

This will only work if the current location is in the filesystem. Check $PWD.Provider.Name first. – Deuterogamy

correct way without provider name checking: [Environment]::CurrentDirectory=(Get-Location -PSProvider FileSystem).ProviderPath – Human