Question

I’m trying to log how long a user stays in a directory. Is there any way to intercept an event whenever someone calls Set-Location?

Answer 1

I also posted to the powershell technet forumn and got a great answer. The short story is, you can set a breakpoint on any object in powershell. With a breakpoint, you can associate a block of code (or leave out the block to pause execution). The even cooler part is that powershell provides a pwd global object that represents the present working directory. You can set a breakpoint on all “write” actions on this global object.

It’s basically an observer pattern or AOP. The best part is this will work for anything that changes the current directory – cd, pushd, popd, etc. Here’s my C# cmdlet code:

InvokeCommand.InvokeScript(@"Set-PSBreakpoint -Variable pwd -Mode Write -Action {
    [Jump.Location.JumpLocationCommand]::UpdateTime($($(Get-Item -Path $(Get-Location))).PSPath);
}");

I’m calling a static method to track the timings. I guess I just prefer C# when possible 🙁