Get-ADUser -Filter Example

The PowerShell command Get-ADUser is part of the Active Directory PowerShell module. Go to this article if you want to know how to install it.

You should use the Filter switch to search effectively for users in your Active Directory. Don’t extract all users and then search the result set.

Use Get-ADUser -Filter to search directly for improved performance.

Understand the Get-ADUser Filter Parameter

With the many various filtering options available (LDAP filtering, oData v3.0 filtering, etc.), the filter switch often causes confusion.

The filter switch used in the Get-ADUser and Get-ADGroup commands uses the PowerShell expression language in the query string.

This is different than, e.g., when using the Get-AzureADUser command (which uses oData v3.0 filtering)!

To understand the (superior) LDAPFilter switch, read this article.

The following operators should cover most of your needs:

Please notice the following in the above examples:

• Enclose the compared value(s) in apostrophes
• Use -like ‘*’ and -notlike ‘*’ to find empty or non-empty values 
• Filter “cryptic” date/time formats directly with a DateTime variable (like e.g. the LastLogonTimeStamp attribute which uses the FileTime format)

Below you have some code snippets that should point you in the right direction on how to structure your filters for your Get-ADUser search queries: