How to filter ProfileList with wildcards - powershell

Question

I'm writing a script to help streamline the deletion of users profile list's on our Citrix servers. I cant figure out how to filter the ProfileImagePath by wildcards.
On our Windows 2008 servers in Regedit I can search and sort the profile list of users cia its Profileimagepath but this gets all the users, I cant seem to extend that filter to only bring back wildcard entries.
set-location | 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList' |% {Get-ItemProperty $_.pspath } | Select
profileImagePath=username*
What I am getting is the whole list of user profiles, or if I put the filter =username* entry I get an error, What I wanted to get was just the results of the wildcard, Ideally just the usernames I put in the wildcard are what I want returned.

Answer 1

The code you posted is utterly broken. Please go find a PowerShell tutorial before proceeding any further.
Set-Location does not produce output, and even if it did, piping cmdlet output into a string wouldn't do anything at all.
You must not wrap statements at arbitrary places like you do in your sample code.
The wrapped registry path string will preserve the embedded newline (thus not matching what you want it to match).
Putting the argument of the Select-Object statement on the next line without escaping the newline will run Select-Object without arguments and the arguments as a separate statement (which most likely will throw an error because the arguments aren't a valid statement by themselves).
= is an assignment operator in PowerShell. Comparison operators are -eq (equality), -like (wildcard matches), and -match (regular expression matches).
You need Where-Object for filtering pipelined objects, not Select-Object. The latter is for selecting object properties.
You propbably meant to do something like this:
$username = '...'
$profilePath = 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList'
Get-ChildItem $profilePath | Where-Object {
(Get-ItemProperty $_.PSPath).ProfileImagePath -like "*${username}*"
}
or (simpler) like this:
$username = '...'
$profilePath = 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList'
Get-ChildItem $profilePath |
Get-ItemProperty |
Where-Object { $_.ProfileImagePath -like "*${username}*" }