Editing a list of users accounts to have the same expiration date

May 16, 2023

I’ve been tasked with setting all users in our AD that are contractors to have their accounts expire at the end of our phiscal year. This sounds like a relatively easy task, but it’s been giving me issues.

All of our contractor accounts start with "c_" making them easy to find with

Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties SAMAccountName | Where {$_.SAMAccountName -like "c_*"} | Select SAMAccountName | Export-Csv -LiteralPath C:\Results\AllContractors.csv -NoTypeInformation

Then it should just be a matter of adapting the command

Set-ADAccountExpiration -Identity "SAMAccountName" -DateTime "07/01/2023"

to be repeated for every SAMAccountName I have in the .csv.

All together I get this:

Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties SAMAccountName | Where {$_.SAMAccountName -like "c_*"} | Select SAMAccountName | Export-Csv -LiteralPath C:\Results\AllContractors.csv -NoTypeInformation

$Users = Import-Csv -LiteralPath C:\Results\AllContractors.csv

ForEach($User in $Users){
    Set-ADAccountExpiration -Identity $User -DateTime "07/01/2023"
    }

But it keeps returning an error:

Set-ADAccountExpiration : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
At line:4 char:5
+     Set-ADAccountExpiration -Identity $User -DateTime "07/01/2023"
+     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (Microsoft.Activ...ement.ADAccount:ADAccount) [Set-ADAccountExpiration], NullReferenceException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : ActiveDirectoryCmdlet:System.NullReferenceException,Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.Commands.SetADAccountExpiration

Any insight into this would be appreciated!

>Solution :

Your issue most likely is because you’re passing a PSCustomObject ($user) with a property named SamAccountName and Set-ADAccountExpiration does not know how to interpret it as its expecting the property value ($user.SamAccountName). Also you can definitely do all of this in a single pipeline using -PassThru. No need to export and then import back the CSV:

Get-ADUser -Filter "samAccountName -like 'c_*'" |
    Set-ADAccountExpiration -DateTime '07/01/2023' -PassThru |
    Select-Object SamAccountName |
    Export-Csv -LiteralPath C:\Results\AllContractors.csv -NoTypeInformation