Listing Network Drives

There are many ways to create a list of network drives. One involves a COM interface that was used by VBScript as well, and we’ll pick it to illustrate a special PowerShell technique.

To dump all network drives, simply run these lines:

$obj = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Network
$obj.EnumNetworkDrives()

The result may look similar to this:

 
PS> $obj.EnumNetworkDrives() 

X:
\\storage4\data
Z:
\\127.0.0.1\c$

The method returns two strings per each network drive: the assigned drive letter, and the original URL. To turn this into something useful, you would have to create a loop that returns two elements per iteration.

Here is a clever approach that does just this:

$obj = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Network
$result = $obj.EnumNetworkDrives() 

Foreach ($entry in $result)
{
    $letter = $entry
    $null = $foreach.MoveNext()
    $path = $foreach.Current
  
  
    [PSCustomObject]@{
        DriveLetter = $letter
        UNCPath = $path
    }
} 

Inside the foreach loop, there is a little-known automatic variable called $foreach. It controls the iterations. When you call MoveNext(), it iterates over the collection, moving to the next element. With Current, you can read the current value of the iterator.

This way, the loop processes two items at a time instead of just one. The two items are then combined in a custom object. The result looks like this:

 
DriveLetter UNCPath       
----------- -------       
X:          \\storage4\data
Z:          \\127.0.0.1\c$

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