PowerShell Start-Job Working Directory
There is nice solution from comments section of some dude's post. Commenter suggests to use Init
parameter to setup working directory of script block.
function start-jobhere([scriptblock]$block) { Start-Job -Init ([ScriptBlock]::Create("Set-Location '$pwd'")) -Script $block}
A possible solution would be to create a "kicker-script":
Start-Job -filepath .\emacs.ps1 -ArgumentList $workingdir, "RandomFile.txt"
Your script would look like this:
Set-Location $args[0]emacs $args[1]
Hope this helps.
Update:
PowerShell [Core] 7.0 brings the following improvements:
Background jobs (as well as thread jobs and
ForEach-Object -Parallel
) now - sensibly - inherit the caller's current (filesystem) location.A new
-WorkingDirectory
parameter allows you to specify a directory explicitly.
To summarize the problem (applies to Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core 6.x)
A background job started with
Start-Job
does not inherit the current location (working directory).It defaults to
$HOME\Documents
in Windows PowerShell, and$HOME
in PowerShell Core.If you're using PowerShell Core and you're targeting a file in the current directory, you can use the following, because the new
... &
syntax by default runs the job in the current directory:emacs RandomFile.txt &
You cannot directly reference variables from the current session in a script block passed to
Start-Job
.
To complement jdmichal's own helpful answer and asavartsov's helpful answer, which still work well:
PSv3 introduced a simple way to reference the current session's variable values in a script block that is executed in a different context (as a background job or on a remote machine), via the $using:
scope:
Start-Job { Set-Location $using:PWD; emacs RandomFile.txt }
Alternatively:
Start-Job { emacs $using:PWD/RandomFile.txt }
Note:
- This GitHub issue reports the surprising inability to use
$using:
in the script block passed to-InitializationScript
, even though it works in the main script block (the implied-ScriptBlock
parameter).Start-Job -Init { Set-Location $using:PWD } { emacs RandomFile.txt } # FAILS