Cleaning up DSGET group command output

[IT2 Myers, Tyler]

Hey guys,

I spent the past hour or so learning about the dsquery, and dsget commands to help me export four groups and their members into an excel spreadsheet for review by my superior, and to better save time of editing 8,000 users individually, I was wondering if anybody had any good practices or ideas on how to clean up the output of the dsget group command.

I can easily export the data into a .csv and open it in Excel, and it reads fine, but my problem is, my superiors expect it to look nice and neat, and having the Distinguished Name on every line, they're going to be reading Chinese.

So I was wondering if there's a way to clean up the DN's so that when you export from a "dsget group -members" command, you get only user names, or login names, or something not 50 characters long.

I googled this and I couldn't find anything, so I'm just throwing my question out there to see if anyone has any ideas. Thanks in advance!

[Joshua]

I didnt like the output that the DS tools generated. So, therefore instead of that you can learn joe's Adfind tool that is well written on the joeware website. That has a huge Ad query tool which will let you define attributes that want it to print and pipe to a CSV file. Can you tell us what does your DSget comman look like?

[IT2 Myers, Tyler]

Hey guys, thanks for replying. My command looks like this:

dsget group "CN=RIVER CITY 1,OU=River City,OU=External Access Groups,DC=cvn68,DC=navy,DC=mil" -members > River City 1.csv

So it exports just fine into the csv file, and I can open it just fine, it's just cleaning up the DN's that I get for every line. If I only had to do this for 30 users I would be fine, but I have four groups, and each group has around 300-1000 people in it. I'd be at this all day...

I'll check out Joeware see if I can find any nifty tools on there...

[IT2 Myers, Tyler]

All right, so I downloaded ADFind and it is a mighty fine program. But I cannot seem to find the command to extract the members of a group. I can find a group and everything, and find several more things, but I can't seem to find the right syntax to extract members.

Also, I do not see an option in here to export to CSV. I see the options to change how the CSV is created, but no default -createcsv command out in plain day. Either I am over-looking a simple command or I am just not typing the right syntax.

And thirdly, is there an "objectcategory" list I can look at? So far I've just been guessing at what I can put in there.

Thanks again for all the help.

[Tomthegreat]

Yes, it might be that those users could be in a different DN paths, that is why DN paths are important.

[IT2 Myers, Tyler]

Yeah, you were right, I was forgetting the quotations around my DN when I put it in Adfind, once I did this and put proper syntax, and used Joe's examples, I was able to export everything in about 5 minutes, and edit the 4 spreadsheets in 10. so I pretty much just did about 2 days worth of monkey punching user names in about 20 minutes. Oh the sweetness of this program.

Thanks all for the help!