Powershell – Open Powershell in a specific directory from shortcut

Use $PSVersionTable.PSVersion to determine the engine version. If the variable does not exist, it is safe to assume the engine is version 1.0.

Note that $Host.Version and (Get-Host).Version are not reliable - they reflect the version of the host only, not the engine. PowerGUI, PowerShellPLUS, etc. are all hosting applications, and they will set the host's version to reflect their product version — which is entirely correct, but not what you're looking for.

PS C:\> $PSVersionTable.PSVersion

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
4      0      -1     -1

I would probably use the -file argument, as in

-file "C:\PowershellScripts\script.ps1"

you may need to set the execution policy first if it's not already set to unrestricted on your system.

On my machine, a Windows 7 64-bit box with 64-bit Eclipse and a 64-bit jdk (1.6), I am able to get things to work if I set the "arguments" field to:

-executionpolicy unrestricted -file "c:\code\test.ps1"

An alternative that also worked for me was:

Set the application to launch as C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe Set the arguments field to something like:

/c "powershell -executionpolicy unrestricted -file c:\code\test.ps1"

That does seem excessively Rube Goldbergian to me, but it's worth a try to see if your problems can be worked around by using a normal shell.

I did briefly get symptoms similar to what you describe, but I can't reproduce them anymore.