How to pull physical path of a Windows Service using Get-Service command

Even with PowerShell 3, I don't see a way to get it with Get-Service.

This 1-liner will get you the pathname, albeit with a little less of the preferred "filter left" behavior:

gwmi win32_service|?{$_.name -eq "AxInstSV"}|select pathname

Or, if you want just the string itself:

(gwmi win32_service|?{$_.name -eq "AxInstSV"}).pathname

I wanted to do something similar, but based on searching / matching the path of the process running under the service, so I used the classic WMI Query syntax, then passed the results through format-table:

$pathWildSearch = "orton";gwmi -Query "select * from win32_service where pathname like '%$pathWildSearch%' and state='Running'" | Format-Table -Property Name, State, PathName -AutoSize -Wrap

You're welcome to turn this into a one-liner by skipping defining and passing $pathWildSearch, or you could just back gwmi statement up to continue after the semi-colon.

@alroc did good, but there's no reason to filter all services. Querying WMI is like querying a DB, and you can just ask WMI to do the filtering for you:

(Get-CimInstance Win32_Service -Filter 'Name = "AxInstSV"').PathName

To explore all of the meta available for that service:

Get-CimInstance Win32_Service -Filter 'Name = "AxInstSV"' | Select-Object *