Four Ways to Get Computer Names to the -computerName Parameter

I'm teaching a class forSAPIEN Technologies in Chicago this week. Actually, everyone's doing a lab on WMI, watching me enter this. Don't you wish you were here? Anyway, we needed to look at various ways to feed computer names to any cmdlet that has a -computerName parameter. Here's what I cam up with:

# get names from a file, one name per line

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_Whatever -computer (Get-Content names.txt)

# get names from Active Directory

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_Something -comp (

Get-ADComputer -filter * | Select-Object -expand name

)

# specify one computer

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_This -computer SERVER-R2

# specify many computers

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_That -computer WESTDC4,EASTDC5

# get names from a CSV file that has a "host" column

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_Those -computer (

Import-CSV computerlist.csv | Select-Object -expand host

)

I used Get-WmiObject for all of the examples, but you can obviously use this with any cmdlet that supports -computerName. Enjoy!

Comments

Plain text