PowerShell - Restore directory of script location while being ran as administrator

Question

My Situation: I have to run a PowerShell script as Administrator (because of accessing a privileged folder) and my script is also referencing files in the same directory as the script. I need to use a relative file path but I can't due to PowerShell switching the directory to C:\\WINDOWS\\system32 when ran as admin.

In PowerShell, is there a way to restore the directory to the current directory that the script is located?

My Script: (will be ran as admin)

Copy-Item -Path .\file1.txt -Destination 'C:\Users\privileged_folder'

Directory Structure:

MyDir\
    file1.txt
    myscript.ps1 <- ran as admin

Answer 1

By Changing Location

In your script, you can set the location to the script folder. From within your script, either of the following techniques will work:

# PowerShell 3+
cd $PSScriptRoot

# PowerShell 2
cd ( Split-Path -Parent $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Definition )

Changing to $PSScriptRoot works in all currently supported versions of PowerShell, but using Split-Path to get the script directory is useful if you for some reason still have nodes running PowerShell 2.

---

If you want to change back to the previous directory after your script is done executing (probably a good move) you can also make use of Push-Location and Pop-Location instead of cd or Set-Location :

# Also aliased to pushd
Push-Location $PSScriptRoot

# My script stuff

# Also aliased to popd
Pop-Location

These two cmdlets treat locations as a stack - Push-Location changes your location and adds the directory to the location stack while Pop-Location will remove the current directory from the stack and return you to the previous location. It works much like push and pop operations on arrays.

---

By Prefixing the Relative Paths

You could also prefix your relative paths in your script with either $PSScriptRoot or ( Split-Path -Parent $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Definition ) as shown in the previous section. If we attach the prefix to the otherwise relative path of file1.txt :

$filepath1 = "${PSScriptRoot}\file1.txt"

Now you have an absolute path to file1.txt . Note that this technique will work with any relative path to $PSScriptRoot , it does not have to be in the same folder as your ps1 script.