I had similar problems and it made me a lot of trouble since I am making programs written in PowerShell (full end user GUI applications) and I have a lot of files and resources I need to load from disk.
From my experience, using ```.``` to represent current directory is unreliable. It should represent current working directory, but it often does not.
It appears that PowerShell saves location from which PowerShell has been invoked inside ```.```.
To be more precise, when PowerShell is first started, it starts, by default, inside your home user directory. That is usually directory of your user account, something like ```C:\USERS\YOUR USER NAME```.
After that, PowerShell changes directory to either directory from which you invoked it, or to directory where script you are executing is located before either presenting you with PowerShell prompt or running the script. But that happens after PowerShell app itself originally starts inside your home user directory.
And ```.``` represents that initial directory inside which PowerShell started. So ```.``` only represents current directory in case if you invoked PowerShell from the wanted directory. If you later change directory in PowerShell code, change appears not to be reflected inside ```.``` in every case.
In some cases ```.``` represents current working directory, and in others directory from which PowerShell (itself, not the script) has been invoked, what can lead to inconsistent results.
For this reason I use invoker script. PowerShell script with single command inside:
```POWERSHELL```.
That will ensure that PowerShell is invoked from the wanted directory and thus make ```.``` represent current directory. But it only works if you do not change directory later in PowerShell code.
In case of a script, I use invoker script which is similar to last one I mentioned, except it contains a file option:
```POWERSHELL -FILE DRIVE:\PATH\SCRIPT NAME.PS1```.
That ensures that PowerShell is started inside current working directory.
Simply clicking on script invokes PowerShell from your home user directory no matter where script is located.
It results with current working directory being directory where script is located, but PowerShell invocation directory being ```C:\USERS\YOUR USER NAME```, and with ```.``` returning one of these two directories depending on the situation, what is ridiculous.
But to avoid all this fuss and using invoker script, you can simply use either ```$PWD``` or ```$PSSCRIPTROOT``` instead of ```.``` to represent current directory depending on weather you wish to represent current working directory or directory from which script has been invoked.
And if you, for some reason, want to retrieve other of two directories which ```.``` returns, you can use ```$HOME```.
I personally just have invoker script inside root directory of my apps I develop with PowerShell which invokes my main app script, and simply remember to never ever change current working directory inside my source code of my app, so I never have to worry about this, and I can use ```.``` to represent current directory and to support relative file addressing in my applications without any problems.
This should work in newer versions of PowerShell (newer than version 2).
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