pwsh-lastdir

Remembers your last visited folder across PowerShell terminal sessions on Windows.

Open a new terminal and you're right back where you left off — no setup, no friction.

Behaviour

How you open the terminal	What happens
New terminal / new tab (no folder specified)	Restores the last folder you were in
"Open in Terminal" from Explorer	Opens in that folder, and remembers it for next time
cd to a new folder	Records it immediately

Requirements

• Windows
• PowerShell 5.1 or later

Install

.\install.ps1

Restart your terminal. That's it.

Uninstall

.\uninstall.ps1

How it works

The installer appends a small block to your PowerShell profile ($PROFILE.CurrentUserAllHosts) that:

1. On startup — if the terminal opened in your home directory or a system path (no specific folder was passed), restores the last saved folder.
2. On startup — saves the current directory only when the terminal was launched via "Open in Terminal" from Explorer.
3. On cd — wraps Set-Location to save the path every time you navigate.

The last directory is stored in ~\.pwsh_lastdir.

Background session protection

Some software (GPU drivers, AI tools, IDEs) spawns PowerShell sessions in the background or in embedded terminals. Without protection, these sessions would overwrite your saved directory.

pwsh-lastdir guards against this in three layers:

• Interactive check — only saves when running in a real terminal ($Host.Name -eq 'ConsoleHost'), ignoring scripted/background sessions.
• Path exclusion — skips paths under AppData, Temp, and Windows.
• Parent process check — on startup, only saves the directory if the terminal was launched by Explorer (explorer.exe). All other apps (LM Studio, VS Code, GPU utilities, etc.) are ignored on startup; user navigation via cd is still tracked normally.

Updating

Just run the installer again:

.\install.ps1

It detects the version already in your profile and upgrades the block in place. Re-running when you're already on the current version is a no-op.

Then restart your terminal.

Backups

install.ps1 and uninstall.ps1 write a timestamped backup of your profile to <profile>.bak-YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS before modifying it. If something goes wrong, restore by copying the backup back over your profile (the path is printed at the end of each run).