Can I check the state of windows explorer window with PowerShell?

Question

I'd like to temporarily map a drive with powershell (I found this post which gave me the commands I need) and then open a windows explorer window displaying that drive. I think I can do this using ii MyDrive:\MyPath\.

I would like, when my windows explorer window is closed by the user, to dismap the network drive previously mapped, and then stop the powershell script.

Question : Is there any way I can check the state of windows explorer window ?

---

I should mention that I never worked with powershell before, so I don't have much knowledge about it.

Answer 1

Hey I didn't get the solution, but maybe my approach is the way to your solution.

I played a bit with the .net functions and get the process. The process is directly gone, after calling the explorer...

So the base-function is

[System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start("explorer.exe", "C:\")

what returns the process:

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName                                                                                                                                                      
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     --  -- -----------                                                                                                                                                      
      4       2      392       1140    10     0,00   6328   1 explorer  

There a some more functions in it like:

[System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start("explorer.exe", "C:\").WaitForExit()

But nothing happens :(

If you put the result into a variable, you can discover the functions and attributes:

$tmp = [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start("explorer.exe", "C:\")

Type $tmp. and hit Strg + Space in ISE

Then I took the process via get-process cmd

$process = get-process -Id ([System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start("explorer.exe", "C:\")).Id

This results me a process like:

> $process

Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K) VM(M)   CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName                                                                                                                                                      
-------  ------    -----      ----- -----   ------     --  -- -----------                                                                                                                                                      
      0       1      384        120     6            8396   1 explorer                                                                                                                                                         

But the same: this process is gone immidiatly :(

I played around and got this resolution:

$path = "C:\temp\test"
$split = $path.split("\\")
$mainWindowTitle = $split[$split.Length - 1]
$tmp = [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start("explorer.exe", $path)
sleep -Seconds 2
Get-Process | ? ProcessName -eq explorer | select * | ? MainWindowTitle -eq $mainWindowTitle | select Id

With this code, I get the Process you're looking for. Let me explain that to you.

First I need the path, and the last subdirectory in it. Every explorer Process has an mainWindowTitle and its value is the name of the opened directory.

So I started the explorer woth the specific path, and splited out the last subdirectory. You need to sleep for 1 or 2 seconds, because the Process take a while, before getting into the process list. Then I searched for every explorer with the windowMainTitle equals the last subdirectory.

So now you got the processId, with allows you to create a while loop, with a sleep in it, where you check if the process still exists.

The only problem is, that the window can't be opened twice or a directory with the same name.

But maybe you can use this code. Just play around and see what you can figure out.

Edit:

This code works for me :)

$path = "C:\temp\test"
$split = $path.split("\\")
$mainWindowTitle = $split[$split.Length - 1]
$tmp = [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start("explorer.exe", $path)
sleep -Seconds 2
$processId = (Get-Process | ? ProcessName -eq explorer | select * | ? MainWindowTitle -eq $mainWindowTitle | select Id).Id
while((get-process -Id $processId ).Length -gt 0){
  sleep -Seconds 1
  $processId = (Get-Process | ? ProcessName -eq explorer | select * | ? MainWindowTitle -eq $mainWindowTitle | select Id).Id
}
# All code after will be executed after window was closed
write-host "Window Closed"

Greetz Eldo.Ob

Answer 2

You can use net use. like this:

net use K: \\servername\sharename /persistent:no

After a logoff the drive is not mapped anymore