Many of you Powershell aficionados out there will be familiar with the fact that there are four separate locations where you can place a profile script. These scripts will run when you start the shell, and that allows you to get some default stuff set up. (How hard can it be? Well actually, much harder!)

Today I got irritated with the fact that I can never find which profile I've put something in. It starts with a vague recollection of "didn't I have something in my profile for that?". Then I start by opening a shell and typing:

notepad $profile

... and thereby opening up my $profile.CurrentUserCurrentHost - which to be fair is where I put most stuff. Not there eh? Ok, let's go looking for the other profiles. So I type:

notepad $profile.<TAB><TAB>

and end up at

notepad $profile.AllUsersAllHosts

Then notepad tells me that this one doesn't exist, so I end up going through the same steps for the other two profiles. Especially on a system where they aren't there, it's just irritating. So I put this in my profile (yes, the CurrentUserCurrentHost one, but actually AllHosts would be better, eh?):

function get-profiles {
    $profile.PSobject.Properties | ? {Test-Path $_.Value} | select Name, Value
}

Now all I have to do is remember that I put it there.