PowerShell Start-Job Working Directory

powershell start-job
jdmichal picture jdmichal · Feb 8, 2010 · Viewed 17.2k times · Source

Is there a way to specify a working directory to the Start-Job command?

Use-case:

I'm in a directory, and I want to open a file using Emacs for editing. If I do this directly, it will block PowerShell until I close Emacs. But using Start-Job attempts to run Emacs from my home directory, thus having Emacs open a new file instead of the one I wanted.

I tried to specify the full path using $pwd, but variables in the script block are not resolved until they're executing in the Start-Job context. So some way to force resolving the variables in the shell context would also be an acceptable answer to this.

So, here's what I've tried, just for completeness:

Start-Job { emacs RandomFile.txt }
Start-Job { emacs "$pwd/RandomFile.txt" }

Answer

asavartsov picture asavartsov · Jun 30, 2013

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
}

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