DSQuery and DSGet - Active Directory command line queries

Recent versions of Active Directory have added some useful  command line options for finding users.  I’ll show a few options here:

dsquery and dsget are my two favorites

dsquery example:  Searching for a know user name to find out what container (ou) it exists in.

dsquery user -name username

The following output is returned:

“CN=username,OU=CORP,OU=Accounts,DC=na,DC=contoso,DC=com”

To find out more about this user account add the attribute option like this:

dsquery user -name username -attr *

Another command line tool for AD is dsget.  You can use dsget to find the groups for a particular user like this: 

dsget user  ”CN=username,OU=CORP,OU=Accounts,DC=na,DC=contoso,DC=com” -memberof