QUERY FOR USER ACCOUNTS IN ACTIVE DIRECTORY WITH POWERSHELL
By Jess Collicott24. February 2012 16:51
Occasionally there is a need to quickly query Active Directory for all user accounts or user accounts with only certain
values in particular properties. This can be done by installing and loading the MicrosoftActive Directory Administration
module for PowerShell. This is an add-on module, named ActiveDirectory, that provides cmdlets that let you manage
your Active Directory domains.
After you install the ActiveDirectory module, there is now a new PowerShell option in Administrative Tools, called “Active
Directory Module for Windows PowerShell”:
This brings up the bland, DOS-like command prompt with the ActiveDirectory module automatically loaded. But what if
you like to work in the Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)? Start up ISE and then run the
following command:
Import-module ActiveDirectory
That will load the ActiveDirectory module into your ISE session, so that you can use the desired cmdlets.
QUERYING FOR USER ACCOUNTS
To query for user accounts, use the Get-ADUser cmdlet. For example, here is how you would query against your domain
for all user accounts:
Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase "DC=ad,DC=company,DC=com"
If you wanted to query for all of the user accounts with the last name “Collicott”, you would run the following:
Get-ADUser -Filter {Surname -eq "Collicott"} -SearchBase
"DC=ad,DC=company,DC=com"
To export the e-mail addresses for all user accounts to a CSV file, you could run the following:
Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase "DC=ad,DC=company,DC=com" -Properties mail | Select mail | Export-CSV "Email
Addresses.csv"
You can also find additional examples by viewing the help on the cmdlet:
Get-Help Get-ADUser -examples