The most widely known PowerShell hosts are certainly powershell.exe and powershell_ise.exe because they ship out-of-the-box. However, there can be many more (and hidden) PowerShell hosts running. Any software that instantiates the PowerShell engine is a PowerShell host. This could be Visual Studio Code (with the PowerShell extension installed), Visual Studio, or any other similar software.
To find out all currently running PowerShell hosts, run this:
Get-ChildItem -Path "\\.\pipe\" -Filter '*pshost*' | ForEach-Object { $id = $_.Name.Split('.')[2] if ($id -ne $pid) { Get-Process -ID $id } }
The result may look like this:
Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) CPU(s) Id SI ProcessName
------- ------ ----- ----- ------ -- -- -----------
1131 101 628520 42440 11216 0 SupportAssistAgent
1011 82 269920 299208 85,30 17420 1 powershell_ise
520 29 68012 75880 1,23 33532 1 powershell
590 31 69508 77712 2,02 36636 1 powershell
545 27 67952 76668 1,14 37584 1 powershell
4114 654 801136 965032 129,69 28968 1 devenv
“SupportAssistAgent” was opened by Visual Studio Code, and “devenv” represents the internal PowerShell host launched by Visual Studio.
