Connecting to a network folder with username/password in Powershell

This is not a PowerShell-specific answer, but you could authenticate against the share using "NET USE" first:

net use \\server\share /user:<domain\username> <password>

And then do whatever you need to do in PowerShell...

At first glance one really wants to use New-PSDrive supplying it credentials.

> New-PSDrive -Name P -PSProvider FileSystem -Root \\server\share -Credential domain\user

Fails!

New-PSDrive : Cannot retrieve the dynamic parameters for the cmdlet. Dynamic parameters for NewDrive cannot be retrieved for the 'FileSystem' provider. The provider does not support the use of credentials. Please perform the operation again without specifying credentials.

The documentation states that you can provide a PSCredential object but if you look closer the cmdlet does not support this yet. Maybe in the next version I guess.

Therefore you can either use net use or the WScript.Network object, calling the MapNetworkDrive function:

$net = new-object -ComObject WScript.Network
$net.MapNetworkDrive("u:", "\\server\share", $false, "domain\user", "password")

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Edit for New-PSDrive in PowerShell 3.0

Apparently with newer versions of PowerShell, the New-PSDrive cmdlet works to map network shares with credentials!

New-PSDrive -Name P -PSProvider FileSystem -Root \\Server01\Public -Credential user\domain -Persist

PowerShell 3 supports this out of the box now.

If you're stuck on PowerShell 2, you basically have to use the legacy net use command (as suggested earlier).