Question

Working with Active Directory export script. Currently, the script easily exports user objects from a given group into a .txt file as fully qualified names (ie. instead of reporting as “username”, you get the ugly “CN=username,OU=foo,OU=bar,DC=foo,DC=bar”).

My Powershell experience is novice at best. What I’ve gotten so far:

• load contents of text file
• split contents of text file at the “,”

• write these contents into a second text file.

• resulting text file looks like this:

  "CN=username  
  OU=foo  
  OU=bar  
  DC=foo  
  DC=bar"
  

My goal:

• Save any resulting line of text that begins with “CN= (yes I’d like to keep that ” at the beginning)
• Delete everything else
• Strip “CN= from the beginning of the resulting lines
• Note: usernames vary in length

What I have so far:

$a = (Get-Content c:\test.txt | foreach-Object {$_.split(",,") })  
Out-File c:\results.txt -inputObject $a

I’m completely lost as to how to search text files for a pattern with a wildcard (ie. seach for any lines that contain “CN=* and keep those lines and those lines only) and then stick the results into a .txt.

Thank you so much for any and all guidance you might provide.

Answer 1

Select-String would allow that. It’s kinda grep for PowerShell.

However, if I understand you correctly you can do that a bit easier with

$a = (Get-Content c:\test.txt | foreach-Object {$_.split(",,") }) -match '^CN='

The comparison operators can be applied to a list of objects and return only the matching items.