PowerShell: How to Change Directory using Set-Location

PowerShell offers a few different ways to change the directory. The official cmdlet to change the directory is Set-Location and it has an aliases: cd, sl, and chdir. PowerShell’s Set-Location is more powerful than Command Prompt’s change directory cd. Set-Location can change directories, change to registry, and change to certificates, and change to environment variables.

I will refer to the cmdlet as Set-Location but they can be swapped out with any of the aliases mentioned earlier. cd being common one used.

Change Directory with Set-Location

In PowerShell, to change the directory we can use Set-Location.

Set-Location -Path C:\

# or simply
Set-Location C:\

If our path has a space in it we need to use quotes or double quotes:

Set-Location 'C:\Program Files'

If we want to display the current location path we can use -PassThru:

Set-Location 'C:\Program Files (x86)\' -PassThru

Output:

Path
----
C:\Program Files

ℹ️ Lots of other cmdlets use -PassThru to output results from the cmdlet.

We can save the results of the -PassThru to a variable.

$result = (Set-Location -Path 'C:\Program Files' -PassThru)

$result will contain $result.Path which will contain the path.

Change Drives

We can change drives and directories at the same time.

Set-Location Z:\games

In the next sections, Environment variables and Registry act like drives. We can change to them in the same way as regular device drives.

Change Directory to the Registry

If you want to set location to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE use HKLM:\:

Set-Location HKLM:\

Output contents with ls:

    Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Name                           Property
----                           --------
HARDWARE
SAM
SOFTWARE
SYSTEM

The other root registry locations are:

Set Location to Environment Variables

We can change the location to the environment variables:

Set-Location Env:\

Then if we do an ls we can see all the environment variables:

Name                           Value
----                           -----
ALLUSERSPROFILE                C:\ProgramData
APPDATA                        C:\Users\Jill\AppData\Roaming
ChocolateyInstall              C:\ProgramData\chocolatey
...etc...

The output will be similar to Get-ChildItem env: to display the environment variables.

Set Location to Certificates

We can change the location to the certificates on the system:

Set-Location Cert:\

Navigate forward and backward

Navigate between forward and backward directories using + and - arguments. This is useful if you make a directory change and want to go back to the previous path and not up a directory (e.g., cd ..).

Set-Location +
# or simply:
cd +

Set-Location -
# or simply:
cd -

Works in Command Prompt too!

Bonus

Where does Set-Location with no arguments take you? To user’s home directory, which is the same as $env:USERPROFILE.

Set-Location common places to go

Here are other default locations that are commonly used:

ℹ️ <User> being equivalent to $env:USERNAME

Happy Coding! 👩‍💻