Managing PowerShell Profiles

Let’s continue our exploration of PowerShell profile scripts and discover how to take advantage of them. A well-designed set of profile scripts can make you more efficient. But, perhaps first, we should take a moment and consider what to put in a PowerShell profile script.

Go Configure

You should consider PowerShell profile scripts to be configuration scripts. I recommend adding commands that make PowerShell easier to use or that meet a business need. For example, I like having an alias of np that will launch Notepad.exe. At any PowerShell prompt, I want to be able to run np. But I don’t want to remember to define it every time I launch PowerShell. Instead, I’ll put this command in a profile script.

Set-Alias -Name np -Value "$env:WinDir\notepad.exe" -Force -Option ReadOnly -Description "profile-defined"