I am wondering how I can delete user profile by using Powershell?
I know the command of Get-WmiObject Win32_UserProfile which will give me the whole users on the computer.
I have 2 variables of $computername and $username.
So I wants to use the above command to delete on a remote computer (which is $computername) the profile of $username.
How I can do it?
Thanks.
Get-WMIObject can retrieve objects from remote computers with no problem, and not only does the Win32_UserProfile class have a (poorly documented) delete() method, a Win32_UserProfile object can be passed to Remove-WMIObject. This will, to all appearances, properly clean up the registry and files, and does in fact work on remote computers.
References:
Get-Help Get-WMIObject
Get-Help Remove-WMIObject
Win32_UserProfile: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee886409(v=vs.85).aspx and https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh830632(v=vs.85).aspx
My own question on this topic
So I need to clear a user's run dialog history which I can do perfectly fine with "reg delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows etc..." from an elevated powershell window on the logged in user's machine, but what I'm looking to do is that same command but from a SYSTEM powershell process. I have already used psexec to create a powershell window which runs as SYSTEM, but because you can't just use HKEY_CURRENT_USER as SYSTEM with the same results, I am finding it quite difficult. If I could just run that command but as username\Administrator then I wouldn't have this problem.
Also to note, if I can somehow grab the username of the logged on user (from SYSTEM still) in one line in plain text (with no other output in sight), then I can store the username in a variable and convert that to an SID and use HKEY_USERS instead.
P.S. Don't ask why I'm running powershell as SYSTEM, I know what I'm doing :D
you can use get-process under the system context powershell and filter where explorer.exe process is running, get the account it is running under then use to convert to SID and go through the registry.
something like this assuming only 1 explorer.exe process is running which is the norm on windows client OS.
$proc = Get-CimInstance Win32_Process -Filter "name = 'explorer.exe'"
$owner = Invoke-CimMethod -InputObject $proc -MethodName GetOwner
$username = $owner.user
$username will contain the user, $owner will also contain domain and a few other things.
to convert to sid
$objUser = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount($owner.Domain, $owner.User)
$strSID = $objUser.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier])
$strSID.Value
How do I get the current username in Windows PowerShell?
I found it:
$env:UserName
There is also:
$env:UserDomain
$env:ComputerName
On Windows, you can:
[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name
I thought it would be valuable to summarize and compare the given answers.
If you want to access the environment variable:
(easier/shorter/memorable option)
[Environment]::UserName -- #ThomasBratt
$env:username -- #Eoin
whoami -- #galaktor
If you want to access the Windows access token:
(more dependable option)
[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name -- #MarkSeemann
If you want the name of the logged in user
(rather than the name of the user running the PowerShell instance)
$(Get-WMIObject -class Win32_ComputerSystem | select username).username -- #TwonOfAn on this other forum
Comparison
#Kevin Panko's comment on #Mark Seemann's answer deals with choosing one of the categories over the other:
[The Windows access token approach] is the most secure answer, because $env:USERNAME can be altered by the user, but this will not be fooled by doing that.
In short, the environment variable option is more succinct, and the Windows access token option is more dependable.
I've had to use #Mark Seemann's Windows access token approach in a PowerShell script that I was running from a C# application with impersonation.
The C# application is run with my user account, and it runs the PowerShell script as a service account. Because of a limitation of the way I'm running the PowerShell script from C#, the PowerShell instance uses my user account's environment variables, even though it is run as the service account user.
In this setup, the environment variable options return my account name, and the Windows access token option returns the service account name (which is what I wanted), and the logged in user option returns my account name.
Testing
Also, if you want to compare the options yourself, here is a script you can use to run a script as another user. You need to use the Get-Credential cmdlet to get a credential object, and then run this script with the script to run as another user as argument 1, and the credential object as argument 2.
Usage:
$cred = Get-Credential UserTo.RunAs
Run-AsUser.ps1 "whoami; pause" $cred
Run-AsUser.ps1 "[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name; pause" $cred
Contents of Run-AsUser.ps1 script:
param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[string]$script,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[System.Management.Automation.PsCredential]$cred
)
Start-Process -Credential $cred -FilePath 'powershell.exe' -ArgumentList 'noprofile','-Command',"$script"
(you may need a hyphen before noprofile, like so)
Start-Process -Credential $cred -FilePath 'powershell.exe' -ArgumentList '-noprofile','-Command',"$script"
$env:username is the easiest way
I'd like to throw in the whoami command, which basically is a nice alias for doing %USERDOMAIN%\%USERNAME% as proposed in other answers.
Write-Host "current user:"
Write-Host $(whoami)
[Environment]::UserName returns just the user name. E.g. bob
[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name returns the user name, prefixed by its domain where appropriate. E.g. SOMEWHERENICE\bob
Now that PowerShell Core (aka v6) has been released, and people may want to write cross-platform scripts, many of the answers here will not work on anything other than Windows.
[Environment]::UserName appears to be the best way of getting the current username on all platforms supported by PowerShell Core if you don't want to add platform detection and special casing to your code.
I have used $env:username in the past, but a colleague pointed out it's an environment variable and can be changed by the user and therefore, if you really want to get the current user's username, you shouldn't trust it.
I'd upvote Mark Seemann's answer:
[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name
But I'm not allowed to. With Mark's answer, if you need just the username, you may have to parse it out since on my system, it returns hostname\username and on domain joined machines with domain accounts it will return domain\username.
I would not use whoami.exe since it's not present on all versions of Windows, and it's a call out to another binary and may give some security teams fits.
Just building on the work of others here:
[String] ${stUserDomain},[String] ${stUserAccount} = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name.split("\")
$username=( ( Get-WMIObject -class Win32_ComputerSystem | Select-Object -ExpandProperty username ) -split '\\' )[1]
$username
The second username is for display only purposes only if you copy and paste it.
I didn't see any Add-Type based examples. Here is one using the GetUserName directly from advapi32.dll.
$sig = #'
[DllImport("advapi32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
public static extern bool GetUserName(System.Text.StringBuilder sb, ref Int32 length);
'#
Add-Type -MemberDefinition $sig -Namespace Advapi32 -Name Util
$size = 64
$str = New-Object System.Text.StringBuilder -ArgumentList $size
[Advapi32.util]::GetUserName($str, [ref]$size) |Out-Null
$str.ToString()
Sometimes the Username attribute has no data in Win32_ComputerSystem even though there's a user signed in. What works for me is to use quser and parse the output. It's not perfect, but it works. E.g.:
$quserdata = #()
$quserdata = quser
$userid = ($quserdata[1] -split ' ')[1]
$userid
Note: if this is run as the user who is logged in, quser adds '>' symbol to the output. Then you need to get rid of that symbol, but mostly this is needed for code run as system or another account than the one that is logged in.
If you're used to batch, you can call
$user=$(cmd.exe /c echo %username%)
This basically steals the output from what you would get if you had a batch file with just "echo %username%".
I find easiest to use: cd $home\Desktop\
will take you to current user desktop
In my case, I needed to retrieve the username to enable the script to change the path, ie. c:\users\%username%. I needed to start the script by changing the path to the users desktop. I was able to do this, with help from above and elsewhere, by using the get-location applet.
You may have another, or even better way to do it, but this worked for me:
$Path = Get-Location
Set-Location $Path\Desktop
In my case, I needed to retrieve the username to enable the script to change the path, ie. c:\users\%username%\. I needed to start the script by changing the path to the users desktop. I was able to do this, with help from above and elsewhere, by using the get-location applet.
You may have another, or even better way to do it, but this worked for me:
$Path = Get-Location
Set-Location $Path\Desktop
EDITED: Here is my code now. The install file does copy to the remote host. However, the WMI portion does not install the .exe file, and no errors are returned. Perhaps this is a syntax error with WMI? Is there a way to just run the installer silently with PsExec? Thanks again for all the help sorry for the confusion:
#declare params
param (
[string]$finalCountdownPath = "",
[string]$slashes = "\\",
[string]$pathOnRemoteHost = "c:\temp\",
[string]$targetJavaComputer = "",
[string]$compname = "",
[string]$tempPathTarget = "\C$\temp\"
)
# user enters target host/computer
$targetJavaComputer = Read-Host "Enter the name of the computer on which you wish to install Java:"
[string]$compname = $slashes + $targetJavaComputer
[string]$finalCountdownPath = $compname + $tempPathTarget
#[string]$tempPathTarget2 =
#[string]$finalCountdownPath2 = $compname + $
# say copy install media to remote host
echo "Copying install file and running installer silently please wait..."
# create temp dir if does not exist, if exist copy install media
# if does not exist create dir, copy dummy file, copy install media
# either case will execute install of .exe via WMII
#[string]$finalCountdownPath = $compname + $tempPathTarget;
if ((Test-Path -Path $finalCountdownPath) )
{
copy c:\hdatools\java\jre-7u60-windows-i586.exe $finalCountdownPath
([WMICLASS]"\\$targetJavaComputer\ROOT\CIMV2:win32_process").Create("cmd.exe /c c:\temp\java\jre-7u60-windows-i586.exe /s /v`" /qn")
}
else {
New-Item -Path $finalCountdownPath -type directory -Force
copy c:\hdatools\dummy.txt $finalCountdownPath
copy "c:\hdatools\java\jre-7u60-windows-i586.exe" $finalCountdownPath
([WMICLASS]"\\$targetJavaComputer\ROOT\CIMV2:win32_process").Create("cmd.exe /c c:\temp\java\jre-7u60-windows-i586.exe /s /v`" /qn")
}
I was trying to get $Job = Invoke-Command -Session $Session -Scriptblock $Script to allow me to copy files on a different server, because I needed to off load it from the server it was running from. I was using the PowerShell Copy-Item to do it. But the running PowerShell script waits until the file is done copying to return.
I want it to take as little resources as possible on the server that the powershell is running to spawn off the process on another server to copy the file. I tried to user various other schemes out there, but they didn't work or the way I needed them to work. (Seemed kind of kludgey or too complex to me.) Maybe some of them could have worked? But I found a solution that I like that works best for me, which is pretty easy. (Except for some of the back end configuration that may be needed if it is is not already setup.)
Background:
I am running a SQLServer Job which invokes Powershell to run a script which backups databases, copies backup files, and deletes older backup files, with parameters passed into it. Our server is configured to allow PowerShell to run and under the pre-setup User account with SQL Server Admin and dbo privileges in an Active Directory account to allow it to see various places on our Network as well.
But we don't want it to take the resources away from the main server. The PowerShell script that was to be run would backup the database Log file and then use the another server to asynchronously copy the file itself and not make the SQL Server Job/PowerShell wait for it. We wanted it to happen right after the backup.
Here is my new way, using WMI, using Windows Integrate Security:
$ComputerName = "kithhelpdesk"
([Wmiclass]'Win32_Process').GetMethodParameters('Create')
Invoke-WmiMethod -ComputerName RemoteServerToRunOn -Path win32_process -Name create -ArgumentList 'powershell.exe -Command "Copy-Item -Path \\YourShareSource\SQLBackup\YourDatabase_2018-08-07_11-45.log.bak -Destination \\YourShareDestination\YourDatabase_2018-08-07_11-45.log.bak"'
Here is my new way using passed in Credentials, and building arg list variable:
$Username = "YouDomain\YourDomainUser"
$Password = "P#ssw0rd27"
$ComputerName = "RemoteServerToRunOn"
$FromFile = "\\YourShareSource\SQLBackup\YourDatabase_2018-08-07_11-45.log.bak"
$ToFile = "\\YourShareDestination\SQLBackup\YourDatabase_2018-08-07_11-45.log.bak"
$ArgumentList = 'powershell.exe -Command "Copy-Item -Path ' + $FromFile + ' -Destination ' + $ToFile + '"'
$SecurePassWord = ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText $Password -Force
$Cred = New-Object -TypeName "System.Management.Automation.PSCredential" -ArgumentList $Username, $SecurePassWord
([Wmiclass]'Win32_Process').GetMethodParameters('Create')
Invoke-WmiMethod -ComputerName $ComputerName -Path win32_process -Name create -ArgumentList $ArgumentList -Credential $Cred
We think that this above one is the preferred one to use.
You can also run a specific powershell that will do what you want it to do (even passing in parameters to it):
Invoke-WmiMethod -ComputerName RemoteServerToRunOn -Path win32_process -Name create -ArgumentList 'powershell.exe -file "C:\PS\Test1.ps1"'
This example could be changed to pass in parameters to the Test1.ps1 PowerShell script to make it more flexible and reusable. And you may also want to pass in a Credential like we used in a previous example above.
Help configuring WMI:
I got the main gist of this working from: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/invoke-wmimethod?view=powershell-5.1
But it may have also needed WMI configuration using:
https://helpcenter.gsx.com/hc/en-us/articles/202447926-How-to-Configure-Windows-Remote-PowerShell-Access-for-Non-Privileged-User-Accounts?flash_digest=bec1f6a29327161f08e1f2db77e64856b433cb5a
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/enable-psremoting?view=powershell-5.1
Powershell New-PSSession Access Denied - Administrator Account
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/invoke-wmimethod?view=powershell-5.1 (I used to get how to call Invoke-WmiMethod).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/core-powershell/console/powershell.exe-command-line-help?view=powershell-6 (I used to get syntax of command line)
I didn't use this one, but could have: How to execute a command in a remote computer?
I don't know for sure if all of the steps in the web articles above are needed, I suspect not. But I thought I was going to be using the Invoke-Command PowerShell statement to copy the files on a remote server, but left my changes from the articles above that I did intact mostly I believe.
You will need a dedicated User setup in Active Directory, and to configure the user accounts that SQL Server and SQL Server Agent are running under to give the main calling PowerShell the privileges needed to access the network and other things to, and can be used to run the PowerShell on the remote server as well. And you may need to configure SQLServer to allow SQL Server Jobs or Stored Procedures to be able to call PowerShell scripts like I did. But this is outside the scope of this post. You Google other places on the internet to show you how to do that.
I'm writing a flow that suppose to copy files from the Netapp storage to one of my VMs, but i have a problem regarding Second Hop authentication.
I found a way to enable a second hop functionality using powershell -CredSSP, but that option does not exist in vco powershell plugin
Are any other way to do that? Or some way to enable cressp in the plugin..
Thanks =)
One workaround that I've used is to deceive the second hop by not using the second hop. First I copy the files that I want each computer to run to the local computer before remoting and running the command. You can accomplish this by using Windows administrative shares. By default, Windows shares their local drives (\\ComputerName\c$ or \\ComputerName\e$). So my script sorta went like this:
$Computers = Get-Content Computerlist.txt
$File = \\Server1\applications$\file.exe
foreach($Computer in $Computers){
copy $file "\\$Computer\c$"
invoke-command -ComputerName $Computer -ScriptBlock {& 'C:\file.exe'}
del "\\$Computer\c$\file.exe"
}