Import Users into AD With One Line and Two Commands

I'm in vacation next week, so I'm doubling up on the blogging this week... 

I think one of the coolest things about PowerShell is pipeline parameter binding. It can't always make things easier, but it OFTEN can. Consider this example of how to read a CSV file and create new users based on the information in that CSV:

Start by assuming I have a CSV file whose column headers align to AD attributes:

samaccountname,name,department,title,city,sn

DonJ,DonJ,IT,CTO,Las Vegas,Jones

GregS,GregS,Custodial,Janitor,Denver,Shields

The "poor" way of doing this in PowerShell - a way remarkably similar to VBScript, in fact - would be to load the lines of the CSV into a variable, enumerate them, and then use the information to populate New-ADUser parameters:

$names = Import-CSV names.csv

foreach ($name in $names) {

 new-aduser -name $name.name -samaccountname $name.samaccountname `

  -department $name.department -city $name.city -sn $name.sn

}

You could collapse that into a one-liner, but it's the same basic approach:

import-csv names.csv | foreach-object { new-aduser -name $_.name 

 -samaccountname $_.samaccountname -department $_.department

 -city $_.city -title $_.title }

You don't need to work that hard. All of those New-ADUser parameters support pipeline parameter binding "ByPropertyName." That means if I pipe in an object or objects - like the ones produced by Import-CSV - PowerShell will look for properties on those objects which match the parameter names of the next command. Matching properties are "fed" to their parameters. So this works just as well:

import-csv names.csv | new-aduser

Done. Really, it's that simple. Try it. So long as the CSV column names match the New-ADUser parameter names, you're gold. And if they don't, you can actually use Select-Object in between those two commands to RENAME columns so that they DO match the parameters of New-ADUser!

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And hey... my ability to keep doing this blog depends on large part upon lots of folks reading it. So tell a colleague, 'kay?