Home Exporting AD users' attributes to CSV file from a text file with only IDs in powershell

Questions

Exporting AD users' attributes to CSV file from a text file with only IDs in powershell

February 14, 2023

I’m using PowerShell, and I’m trying to export AD users’ attributes to a CSV file from a text file that contains only user IDs (samAccountName). The text file can contain any amount of user IDs.

The problem is that when I run the code I have, the file created only has 1 entry, and it’s always the last user in the list of users in the text file, regardless of the amount of users I try to get the info for.

The code I run is this:

$Users = Get-Content "C:\IDs.txt" |
ForEach-Object {Get-ADUser -Identity $User -Properties * | Select Name,SamAccountName,Description,Title,DistinguishedName,Enabled | Export-Csv "c:\UserInfo.csv" -NoTypeInformation}

Thank you in advance for your help.

>Solution :

The following statement wouldn’t work:

$Users = Get-Content "C:\IDs.txt" | ForEach-Object {
    Get-ADUser -Identity $User -Properties * ....

Because $User is not defined, in a ForEach-Object loop, to refer to the current item from the pipeline, you should use $_ ($PSItem).

As for the likable cause you get the last element in your export, you have previously defined $User while testing your code, then you’re querying the same AD Object for each line in C:\IDs.txt and the export, since Export-Csv is inside the loop, is being overwritten over and over.

The steps to fix it are quite straight forward, just put Export-Csv as the last statement in your pipeline and change $User for $_:

$props = 'Name', 'SamAccountName', 'Description', 'Title', 'DistinguishedName', 'Enabled'
Get-Content "C:\IDs.txt" |
    ForEach-Object { Get-ADUser -Identity $_ -Properties $props } |
    Select-Object $props |
    Export-Csv "c:\UserInfo.csv" -NoTypeInformation

Also the assignment to $Users ($Users = ...) will be always null since the output from Get-ADUser is being directed to Export-Csv.

Lastly, since Get-ADUser can process identities from pipeline, no ForEach-Object is needed:

$props = 'Name', 'SamAccountName', 'Description', 'Title', 'DistinguishedName', 'Enabled'
Get-Content "C:\IDs.txt" | Get-ADUser -Properties $props |
    Select-Object $props |
    Export-Csv "c:\UserInfo.csv" -NoTypeInformation