Minding Path Inputs in a Cmdlet

When I was a Monad neophyte, I was asked to write a Cmdlet taking a file path as a parameter. A big mistake I made was not keeping in mind that in Monad the FileSystem provider was just one of the many providers. (This makes Monad different from many other shells where you are always in a directory.) For a path-taking Cmdlet, this means two things. The first is that the input path can be specifying a non-FileSystem provider such as the registry provider. The second is that the Cmdlet can be invoked from a non-FileSystem provider. This makes a relative input path not relative to the FileSystem provider. Besides the provider issues, a path in Monad can also be drive-qualified or home-relative. Also, a drive can be mounted at a location that is not the root of the file system.

To deal with all these conditions, the Cmdlet needs to call SessionState.Path.GetResolvedProviderPathFromMshPath and checks the provider returned . If the path does not exist, SessionState.Path.GetUnresolvedProviderPathFromMshPath is used. However, as of Beta 3, this API does not return the provider. We are looking to add a version that does return the provider in V1. As usual, we can't promise this will happen.

In future versions, we hope to provide enough functionalities so that Cmdlets that writes to a path can use InvokeProvider.Content.GetWriter(path). This enables the Cmdlet to write to any provider that implements the IContentCmdletProvider interface. Moreover, the Cmdlet does not need to worry about what provider a path specifies. Again, we can't promise this will happen.

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Kevin Loo [MSFT]
Microsoft Command Shell Development
Microsoft Corporation
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