#PSTip Using CIM cmdlets to find the user group membership

Note: This tip requires PowerShell 3.0 or above.

Recently, on Windows Server 2012, I was trying to determine, both locally and remotely, if a user belongs to a specific group. For example, when I am running Hyper-V automation scripts, I need to determine if the currently logged-in user is part of Hyper-V administrators group or not.

In PowerShell 3.0, we can use CIM cmlets and associations to find this easily.

Get-CimInstance -Filter "Name='Jeff'" -ClassName Win32_UserAccount |
Get-CimAssociatedInstance -Association Win32_GroupUser |
Select-Object Name

Simple!

Now, to find the group memberships of the locally logged-in user on a remote machine, we just need to run:

Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_UserAccount -Filter "Name='$env:UserName'" -ComputerName Server-01 | 
Get-CimAssociatedInstance -Association Win32_GroupUser |
Select-Object Name