Persist current directory between PowerShell sessions - powershell

Question

Is there a way to make PowerShell Console remember the current directory from the last time it was run and use that as the default location for the next instance?
eg.
Open PowerShell Console
Set-Location c:\tmp
Close PowerShell
Open PowerShell Console
Get-Location returns c:\tmp

Answer 1

You could change the prompt function to save location changes to a user environment variable:
$Function:prompt = {
if([System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("LocationMemory",[System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User) -ne $PWD){
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("LocationMemory",$PWD,[System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)
}
"PS $($ExecutionContext.SessionState.Path.CurrentLocation)$('>' * ($NestedPromptLevel + 1))"
}
And then check if the environment variable exists and is valid when powershell starts
if(($LastLocation = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("LocationMemory",[System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User))){
if((Test-Path $LastLocation -PathType Container)){
Set-Location $LastLocation
}
}
Put both snippets in your profile to make it work. You probably want to limit it to $Profile.CurrentUserCurrentHost

Answer 2

I don't know if this is perfect but testing on my machine it seems to work. First check out this question/answer, this is the icing of the cake. You are basically going to have to log the current path of your session through an exiting event with PowerShell.
You can add this bit of code to your $PROFILE so it will always register the exit event and then set the path.
Register-EngineEvent PowerShell.Exiting -Action {(Get-Location).Path | Out-File 'C:\Users\wshaw\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\LastPath.txt' -Force}
$lastPath = 'C:\Users\wshaw\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\LastPath.txt'
if (Test-Path $lastPath) {
Set-Location (Get-Content $lastPath)
}

Answer 3

Thanks to #Shawn and #Mathias for both giving great answers. I ended up combining your approaches to come up with the following:
Register-EngineEvent PowerShell.Exiting -Action {
Write-Warning "Saving current location"
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("LocationMemory", (Get-Location).Path, [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)
} | Out-Null
$lastPath = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("LocationMemory",[System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)
if (($lastPath -ne $null) -and (Test-Path $lastPath)) {
Set-Location $lastPath
}
There is around a 4 second delay for me when SetEnvironmentVariable is called, which is why I added the Write-Warning (otherwise you might think that the console window isn't closing after you exited or clicked on the Close Window control)