PowerShell Start-Job Working Directory

Question

Is there a way to specify a working directory to the Start-Job command?

Use-case:

I'm in a directory, and I want to open a file using Emacs for editing. If I do this directly, it will block PowerShell until I close Emacs. But using Start-Job attempts to run Emacs from my home directory, thus having Emacs open a new file instead of the one I wanted.

I tried to specify the full path using $pwd, but variables in the script block are not resolved until they're executing in the Start-Job context. So some way to force resolving the variables in the shell context would also be an acceptable answer to this.

So, here's what I've tried, just for completeness:

Start-Job { emacs RandomFile.txt } Start-Job { emacs "$pwd/RandomFile.txt" } 

Answer 1

There is nice solution from comments section of some dude's post. Commenter suggests to use Init parameter to setup working directory of script block.

function start-jobhere([scriptblock]$block) {     Start-Job -Init ([ScriptBlock]::Create("Set-Location '$pwd'")) -Script $block } 

Answer 2

A possible solution would be to create a "kicker-script":

Start-Job -filepath .\emacs.ps1 -ArgumentList $workingdir, "RandomFile.txt" 

Your script would look like this:

Set-Location $args[0] emacs $args[1] 

Hope this helps.