Using get-aduser to search for enabled users in entire domain filter ..

Question

Hi,
my first post here.
I have the following problem. I am trying to figure out to create a powershell command (with get-aduser) that searches for only enabled
users (in the entire domain),  whose user account login names starts with "b" or "B" (because their user account login names are composed of Bnnnnn, n=numbers). I suppose that a string of "B*" in the command should be sufficient. The query result
must show the user account login name (Bnnnnn),  first name
and last name  and the enabled  (yes) status  of those enabled users. I would like to write the entire query result to a file (csv format), saving it to c: for example
Please help. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I use -LDAPFilter mostly because I am used to the LDAP syntax. It can be used in PowerShell, VBScript, dsquery, VB, and many command line utilities (like Joe Richards' free adfind utility). Active Directory is an LDAP compliant database.
The PowerShell -Filter syntax can do the same things, but the properties it exposes are really aliases. I'm used to the AD attribute names, like sAMAccountName and userAccountControl. PowerShell uses things like "enabled" and "surname", which are aliases
you need to know or look up. For example, the Get-ADUser default and extended properties, with the actual AD attributes they are based on, are documented here:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12037.active-directory-get-aduser-default-and-extended-properties.aspx
Finally, note that the "Name" property refers to the Relative Distinguished Name (RDN) of the object, which for user objects is the value of the cn attribute (the Common Name of the user). This may not uniquely identify the user, as it only needs to be unique
in the parent OU/container. The user login name (pre-Windows 2000 logon name) is the value of the sAMAccountName attribute, which must be unique in the domain. In the Wiki article I linked, we see that the PowerShell alias for this attribute is "SamAccountName"
(in this case the name of the property matches the name of the AD attribute). All of this can be confusing.
Richard Mueller - MVP Directory Services