2nd line support engineer: Can you write me a script to give me a list of all the users whose accounts have expiry dates and whether those accounts are disabled or not
Me: no need. Just use
dsquery user -limit 0 | dsget user -samid -acctexpires -disabled
2nd line support engineer: that's only showing me users that don't have expiry dates - and i know for a fact that some of them do.
Me: (Assuming that the items wanted were simply being swamped by the vast number of accounts that didn't have an expiry date)
ok, then try this:
dsquery user -limit 0 | dsget user -samid -acctexpires -disabled | grep -v "never"
I supplied a copy of grep.exe from the gnu unix utils ports, as i couldn't make find work after two pipes for some reason
http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/
2nd line support engineer: now i'm getting nothing at all
Me:
It's at this point I decide it's probably worth shadowing the engineer's TS session and having a look for myself what is going on
After deconstructing the pipe and using text files:
dsquery user -limit 0 > users.txt (Worked fine)
type users.txt | dsget user -samid (produced some results and then failed with the error:
dsget failed: Directory object not found.
type dsget /? for help.
followed by a PARTIAL list of user samid's (causing the error to scroll off-screen and making it difficult to find))
Looking at the last samid on the list, i searched for that user in users.txt - then looked at the next user in the list. Gotcha!!!!
The next user in the list had an apostrophe in his name! - very strange.... I'd have expected microsoft to sort that one out fairly quickly.
did a google - found http://www.rlmueller.net/CharactersEscaped.htm which (although suggesting that ' was a valid character) also suggested deconstructing the command using text files and manually editing the user DSNs. - not my favorite solution
With a little but of poking around in the help for the ds command, i found a couple of highly interesting switches
-uco output unicode
-uci input unicode
-uc both of the above
and so, with a few judicious switches on the initial syntax, the command ran through without errors:
Dsquery user –uc –limit 0 | dsget user –uci –samid –acctexpires –disabled | grep –v “never”
Problem solved.
Hope this can help someone else out there with a similar problem!
