Creating a registry key with path components via PowerShell

Question

For a legacy application, I need to create a registry key with a name in the format c:/foo/bar/baz. (Note: forward slashes, not backslashes.) To be clear: that is a single key's name, with forward slashes, that otherwise looks like a Windows path. Because I need to script this against lots of servers, PowerShell seems like a great option.

The problem is that I cannot figure out how to create a key in that format via PowerShell. New-Item -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Some\Key -Name 'c:/foo/bar/baz' errors out with PowerShell thinking I'm using / as a path separator and failing to find the path HKLM:\Software\Some\Key\c:\foo\bar, which does indeed not exist (and shouldn't). I can't find any other way to (ab)use New-Item to get what I want.

Is there something I'm missing, or should I give up and just generate and load a registry dump the old-fashioned way?

Benjamin Pollack · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-04 13:55:34Z

18

You need to do two things. First you need to get a writable RegistryKey object, otherwise you can't modify anything anyway. Second, use the CreateSubKey method on the RegistryKey object directly.

$writable = $true
$key = (get-item HKLM:\).OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE", $writable).CreateSubKey("C:/test")
$key.SetValue("Item 1", "Value 1")

After you create the key you use the resulting object to add values to it.

edited Feb 4, 2015 at 13:55

Benjamin Pollack

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answered Apr 22, 2013 at 14:30

Stefan Rusek

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5 Comments

Danny Tuppeny Over a year ago

I thought FogBugz had keys like this, but the slashes go the other way: i42.tinypic.com/154jzac.jpg

Benjamin Pollack Over a year ago

@DannyTuppeny You guessed the software, but they're actually forward slashes in my original question. PowerShell is just using the fact that UNC paths treat "\" and "/" identically to make my life annoying.

Danny Tuppeny Over a year ago

@BenjaminPollack Oops, didn't read the question properly! Seems like this "helpful" feature might make it impossible to do natively. You could call out to .NET, but obviously that's not ideal :-(

Stefan Rusek Over a year ago

in powershell there is no such things as calling "out to .net". Powershell is 100% .net.

Danny Tuppeny Over a year ago

@StefanRusek I was referring to using the .NET classes directly rather than the PowerShell cmdlets/providers :-)

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