PowerShell: Automating Administrative Tasks

Finding WMI classes

The first thing to know about the WMI classes is that there are a ton of them. So many, in fact, that you will almost certainly never need to use most of them. As there are so many classes, finding the class that you want to work with can be interesting. The Get-WMIObject cmdlet has a parameter called –List, which lets you get a list of the classes installed on your computer. Combining this cmdlet with Measure-Object shows that my computer (Windows 7) has over a thousand classes in the default namespace:

You clearly don't want to look through a list of so many items, so you can narrow down the list with the –Class parameter, which ...