Excluding non-essential text from AD query

PowerShell Help
1

Hello,

When I run the following cmdlet:

Get-ADComputer -Filter * -SearchBase “CN=Computers, DC=companyname, DC=net” | Select Name

I get the following result where it just shows the computer name as desired:

acomputername

However, if I use the script below, I get this format instead:

@{Name=acomputername}

So how do I go about excluding the @{Name=} portion from the computer name?

Sorry for the formatting, I wasn’t sure where to put the code in the Tools-><> Source Code option in relation to the <P>s.

$test = Get-ADComputer -Filter * -SearchBase “CN=Computers, DC=companyname, DC=net” | Select Name

foreach($line in $test) {
if($line -match $regex){
write-host $line
}
}

2

Use the -ExpandProperty parameter with Select-Object.

 

3

When you run commands in PowerShell like Get-ADComputer it returns objects. While a text representation of those objects are displayed on the screen, that is just a representation not the full object. In your first case you piped the objects to Select-Object and specifically asked for the Name property of the object although there are many other properties available. Instead of piping to Select-Object, pipe the output to Get-Member and you can see all the available properties for the objects it returns. I suspect you want to filter the results based on the name property and a regular expression. In your foreach loop however, you are comparing the entire object (even though at this point it only has a name property since that is what you selected) against the regular expression. You would need to de-reference the object with the dot operator ($line.name -match $regex). Just to make things a little cleaner, I would write it this way:

Get-ADComputer -Filter * -SearchBase “CN=Computers, DC=companyname, DC=net” |
    Where-Object {$_.name -match $regex} |
        Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name

 

 

4

[quote quote=269141]Use the -ExpandProperty parameter with Select-Object.

[/quote]
Looks like Matt beat me to the punch. ExpandProperty will work as because instead of returning a custom object with a Name property that you would have to reference with the property de-reference operator (dot), it will return just the string value of that property.

5

Thanks for the responses from all of you. That addressed my question perfectly.

6

the other approach depending on what you’re doing with the data in the end, or if you need to use multiple values out of the results.
$line.name

or if you are trying to use it in some strings you can do $($line.name)