What You Need to Know to Start Using PowerShell's Personal Profile Scripts

If you aren't familiar with PowerShell's personal profile scripts, they're simply plain text files containing commands that PowerShell executes when it starts up. These scripts don't exist unless you create them, so here's a quick walkthrough on how to set up a profile script and some information to help you understand how they fit into PowerShell's startup process.

How to Set Up a Profile Script
The first step in setting up a standard personal profile script is to find the pathname for that script. PowerShell keeps the pathname in the PowerShell variable $profile, even if the script doesn't exist. So, you can simply type

$profile

after the PowerShell prompt to see the literal path to that file. If you're running Windows XP from your C drive and are logged in as user Owner, $profile will be C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1.

To create your profile script, open a text editor and type or paste in the code you want PowerShell to execute at startup, then save the file using the pathname shown in $profile. You might need to create the folder WindowsPowerShell before saving the file. . . .