PowerShell: Automating Administrative Tasks

Searching for WMI classes

There are instances when you may want to search for different WMI classes on a system. The two primary cmdlets that enable you to search WMI are get-wmiobject, and get-cimclass. You can simply leverage the get-wmiobject cmdlet with the –list argument to list all the classes in a particular namespace. You can further narrow down the list by piping the command to the statement where {$_.Name –like "*Search*"}. This will search the Name property of the classes that match a specific criterion.

An example of using the get-wmiobject cmdlet to find classes with a specific value would look like:

get-wmiobject –list | where{$_.Name –like "*Time*"}

The output of this command is shown in the following screenshot:

The preceding example ...