[Environment]::CurrentDirectory is the Current Directory?

Steps to reproduce

PS > Set-Location /
PS > (Get-Location).Path
/
PS > [Environment]::CurrentDirectory
/home/user

Expected behavior

PS > Set-Location /
PS > (Get-Location).Path
/
PS > [Environment]::CurrentDirectory
/

Actual behavior

[Environment]::CurrentDirectory shows not “Current Directory”, rather “Start Directory”

Environment data

Name                           Value
----                           -----
PSVersion                      7.1.2
PSEdition                      Core
GitCommitId                    7.1.2
OS                             Linux 5.10.15-172.current #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Feb 12 16:35:57 UTC 2021
Platform                       Unix
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…}
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1
WSManStackVersion              3.0

[jborean93]

[Environment]::CurrentDirectory refers to the process wide working directory. This is different from the PowerShell location which is specific to the Runspace the pipeling is running in. They are not designed to impact each other because:

• There can be multiple runspaces per thread, if you are running multiple runspaces then each could be setting their own location overwiting the process wide working directory causing all sorts of race conditions
• A PowerShell location can be more than just a filesystem path, on Windows you have registry/cert/wsman/etc so setting a location to something that isn’t a filesystem cannot translate to the current directory

In short you should always resolve your paths to the absolute path before calling any .NET functions. This will ensure that any relative directories are relative to PowerShell’s location rather than the process wide currenct directory.

[237dmitry]

I get the potential for confusion

Thank you. I thought I was misunderstood with all these online translators.