I’m getting pretty used to powershell in my day to day workings with Exchange. Today however, I was helping a user out on a PC in a different department and I needed to find all of the members of a specific security group. Sure, I could remote back into my work PC and launch ADUC but I’d rather be able to query it with a single query…all from right there using her computer with the limited user account.
Thanks to powershell, I now think in pipes…while I’ve always done this with Linux, I’ve never had to do so with Windows. It’s almost like wearing two caps at the same time. Nonetheless, I was able to figure out how to do this after 3 or 4 attempts and then output it to a file so I could see members of the security group and I did so without the power of powershell (ba-dum-ching!)
I used dsquery and piped the command using dsget to grab the information I needed and then output that into a text file onto the desktop. Important to note that you should open the command window using ‘run as’. So in XP, browse to Start >> Programs >> Accessories and then right click ‘command prompt’ and ‘run as’ with elevated privileges. You’ll need to be able to view the group you’re querying. I used my own user since I’m a domain admin…you get the idea. Once you have the command prompt, cd to Desktop so the text file will be easy to find. Then initiate the following command:
dsquery group -name GroupName |dsget group -members |dsget user -display >memberlist.txt
Substitute for GroupName and put in the group you’re looking for. Hopefully this helps out.
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