November 3, 2017 at 2:06 pm

maybe not the best title, and this is probably a logic question more than a powershell question. but here we are. hopefully i'm missing something simple. I have a two column array. column 1 "SERVER" is full of server names, and column 2 "MEMBER" is each group in the Administrators group on that server. So column 1 has duplicates depending on how many groups are in its Administrators group.

SERVER MEMBER
server1 domain admins
server1 some-group
server1 server1-localadmins
server2 domain admins
server2 some-other-group
server2 server2-localadmins
server3 domain admins
server4 server4-localadmins

I want to make sure that every server in column 1 has the "[servername]-localadmins" group in column 2. so in the samp;le above, I want to go through that list and return server3 because there is no "server3-localadmins" in column 2.

November 3, 2017 at 2:16 pm

I'd probably run the whole collection through Select-Object -unique to generate and store a list of unique server names.

I'd then enumerate those. For each server name, I'd select – from the original collection and using Where-Object – all objects having the current server name. I'd then further Where-Object that to get just the objects with localadmins, and send that to Measure-Object.

If the resulting Measure object had a count of zero, I'd output the current server name.

Vaguely, because I haven't had coffee yet...

$coll = do whatever you do to populate the collection

$names = $coll | select-object -prop server -unique | select -expand server

ForEach ($name in $names) {
  $count = $coll | Where server -eq $name | Where member -eq localadmins | measure
  If ($count.count -eq 0) {
   Write $name
  }
}

November 3, 2017 at 2:37 pm

awesome. thank you. I thought about filtering down a unique list of server names, but didn't know how.

can I also ask about the "select -expand server"? i assume that is why you don't have to put $name.server in the where clause. "expand" just removes the column heading from the array, more or less?

November 3, 2017 at 3:21 pm

Well, more accurately, it “expands” (or “extracts”) the contents of the property into a standalone string. But yeah, it's so I don't have to refer to a property of an object.