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Start-Process for directories ^
If you want to open File Explorer from your current location on the command line, you could do this with the following command:
explorer .
cmd.exe knows the start command, which offers a variety of additional optional commands for the execution of a program. The next simple command also opens Explorer in the current folder:
Start .
In PowerShell, the start command exists as an alias of the Start-Process cmdlet. If you pass the name of a directory as an argument, it will open Explorer at this location. In the above case, this would be “.\”; however, you can use any other path.
Starting File Explorer in the current folder
Of course, in addition to explicitly passing a directory, you can also work with variables here. For instance, the following command displays the home directory of the currently logged-on user in File Explorer:
Start $env:USERPROFILE
Other useful environment variables are SystemRoot and TEMP.
Executing with administrative rights ^
You can also execute a new process with administrative rights by passing the parameter runas:
Start explorer.exe $pwd -verb runas
In most cases, you don’t need this feature when starting Explorer. It would be more interesting for a new command line with administrative rights. This works, but cmd.exe and PowerShell ignore the working directory if you pass it as a variable with the above pattern.
Full screen or normal window ^
If you want, you can also determine if the corresponding program will start in a normal window, minimized, or in full screen mode:
Start . -WindowStyle Maximized
The alternatives to Maximized are Minimized, Normal, and Hidden, although the latter is rarely useful in practice.
Opening multiple directories simultaneously ^
A restriction of Start-Process is that it can only start one process per call. For example, if you want to open two folders in Explorer in order to copy files between them, Invoke-Item is the better option:
Invoke-Item .\Documents, .\Downloads
This call would display the current folder's subdirectories Documents and Downloads in Explorer. In this case, you can’t use the WindowStyle parameter.
Is it possible to use powershell to open File Explorer with a subset of wildcard matched files?
For instance, when I start power shell it starts me in my c:\ users folder. I have a folder located at D:\test\This\Out. I contains *.txt, *.jpg, and *.docx files. I would like to open Windows Explorer with only the following files displayed within the explorer: *.jpg. There are hundreds of files in the folder. I specifically want display just the files matching this wildcard “d:\test\this\out\h100*.jpg” which should result in displaying a fully functional file explorer with only the files matching that string I just mentioned. Currently, about 164 files should be present in the view.
I have tried all sorts of ways to invoke explorer, start explorer, using invoke-item, invoice-expression, use the file system object and setting a workingdirectory which doesn’t work at all. I’ve tried setting the path as the second parameter. Again, nothing happens.
Any suggestions on how to make this work?