In Part 1 we looked at the Get-ADUser command, and used it to create a list of all users and display their homedrive, homedirectory and scriptpath.

In this post we’ll look at refining the results a little.

We’ll look at sorting the results, only returning results for user accounts that have a login script, and export them to CSV, which is much more useful than exporting the results to a text file.

So, the final command we ended Part 1 with was the following and it returned a text file to us with a list of all users as seen in the image below (I’ve added a few more parameters to users in this example.

Try Get-ADUser -filter * -properties scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory | ft Name, scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory > C:\temp\users.txt

In this next example, I’ve added the where cmdlet to only return results that contain bat in the script path.

Try Get-ADUser -filter * -properties scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory | where {$_.scriptpath – like “*bat*”} | ft Name, scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory

Now for some reason we may want to sort the list by scriptpath, so we add in the sort-object cmdlet.

Try, Get-ADUser -filter * -properties scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory | where {$_.scriptpath – like “*bat*”} | sort-object scriptpath | ft Name, scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory

And finally, lets export the list to CSV so we can work on it in Excel. In this example we substitute, format table (ft) for select-object.

Try, Get-ADUser -filter * -properties scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory | where {$_.scriptpath – like “*bat*”} | sort-object scriptpath | select-object Name, scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory | Export-csv -path c:\temp\user-login-script-20130429.csv

Below are some links to invaluable Microsoft Technet references.

Get-ADUser can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee617241.aspx

Where cmdlet can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee177028.aspx

Sort-Object cmdlet can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176968.aspx

Select-Object cmdlet can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176955.aspx

Export-csv cmdlet can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176825.aspx

Related Posts:

1. PowerShell: Get-ADUser to retrieve logon scripts and home directories – Part 1

2. Introducing Windows Server 2012 – Free ebook

3. Where is Windows Server 2012 Sysprep?

4. Recommended Small Business Scenarios with Windows Server 2012 Guide Available for Download

Having recently taken on a new client with a system that had been neglected somewhat I wanted to find out about the state of their user accounts.

I’d already looked at a couple of users at random and noticed some users had logon scripts while others didn’t, and some users had home drives while others didn’t.

Although the organisation wasn’t large, they had more than enough user accounts that I didn’t want to manually check every one. So i turned to PowerShell’s Get-ADUser command.

I’m not a PowerShell expert, and haven’t really given it much time until recently. But since using Windows Server 2012 I’ve found myself using it more and more, and I’m starting to like it!

Right, on with a quick tutorial of Get-ADUser.The following screenshots are taken from my Windows Server 2012 demo lab.

Get-ADUser on it’s own won’t give you any information. You need to give it a filter.Try Get-ADUser -filter *.

This will return all the users in the domain. But as you can see from the format it isn’t really that useful to us at the moment as it isn’t showing any logon script information or home drives.Next lets single out an individual user and see what information we can see.

Try Get-ADuser username -properties *.

This will show you all the properties associated with the user. Now we can see a list of all the properties associated with a user account, we can start to format the Get-ADUser command to just show us the information we require.

Try Get-ADUser username Joe.bloggs -properties scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory

We can now see the information we want for a single user, but a table of users would be useful…

Try Get-ADUser -filter * -properties scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory | ft Name, scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory

Now the last step is to output the table to a file so we can use it in our documentation.

Try Get-ADUser -filter * -properties scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory | ft Name, scriptpath, homedrive, homedirectory > C:\temp\users.txt

By taking a look at the properties of an individual user you can build a table with any combination of user properties you are interested in.

The Microsoft Technet reference can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee617241.aspx

In Part two of this post we’ll look at Sorting tables and Exporting to CSV and picking out selecting data using parameters.

Related Posts:

1.PowerShell: Get-ADUser to retrieve logon scripts and home directories – Part 2

2. Introducing Windows Server 2012 – Free ebook

3. Where is Windows Server 2012 Sysprep?

4. Recommended Small Business Scenarios with Windows Server 2012 Guide Available for Download