Using dsget and dsquery

Being a developer in the support department in a medium-large organisation forces you to do some odd bits and pieces that would usually be performed by the system admins in a bigger company. So this week I was asked to do a bit of command line trickery using some Active Directory administration tools to extract some user information.

The company I work for wanted mobile phone numbers extracted to files based on the email groups. For example I belong to a group, let's call it "Support" (how original), that is an email group in AD. Management wanted the name and mobile phone number of each person who's receives an email when it's sent to "Support" spit out to a file called "Support.csv" in the format "Username", "Mobile Number", to be used for updating an SMS application.

I won't cover the conversion from the odd format that comes out of the tools to CSV, suffice to say it's easy with python, or ruby or perl, so here's the command:


dsquery group ou="User Groups",dc=domainname,dc=net -name "Support" | dsget group -members -expand | dsget user -display -mobile -c > c:\Support.txt

In order from left to right, this command runs dsquery to find the any group called Support in the User Groups organisational unit on the domainname.net domain. It then runs dsget against it to spit out the full list of member objects, the -expand makes it expand all of the groups below it. It finally runs dsget against all of these objects and if it's a user pipes the display name and number out to Support.txt. The -c is important, it ensures that any groups that come out of the "dsget group" call don't crash the "dsget user" call.