ls is a Powershell alias for Get-ChildItem, Powershell’s method of listing the child items of an object. A few searches reveal that this is a built-in Powershell folder provided by the Powershell Environment Provider. Method two uses the static method GetEnvironmentVariables() of the .NET class [System.Environment] to list the same information as our ls env: I’ve been heavily using Powershell for three or four months now, and I already thought very highly of it.