CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellprintingpowershell-4.0pipingnetwork-printers
evansmtihc
evansmtihc

Reputation: 1

Powershell 4 piping & Get-Printer interaction

I am attempting to write a short script that will get a list of all of the computers in the domain and then run Get-Printer on them to obtain a list of all of the installed printers on each machine.

To obtain the list of computers in the domain I would like to use "net view" so I tried

net view | ForEach-Object {Get-Printer -ComputerName $_}

But that does not work. Instead I just get a line of "spooler service is not reachable" for each PC in net view.

Manually entering the pc names into "Get-Printer" works perfectly and I actually wrote a working script that outputs the results of net view to a .txt file after searching for PC names in the text, then it reads each line from the text file and inputs them sequentially into "Get-Printer". But I would like to be able to expand upon this code to centrally manage the printers so I need to get this working from one line which I think is possible.

Can anyone explain what I am missing here? How does ForEach actually work in Powershell 4?

The following is my working code that writes to a file and then reads from it:

$PCs = net view /all | Select-String "\\"

$a = ForEach ($Line in $PCs)

{   $Line -Replace(" ","")

}

$a | Out-file -FilePath C:\Users\esmith\Desktop\test.txt -Encoding ascii

Get-content C:\Users\esmith\Desktop\test.txt | ForEach-Object {Get-Printer -cn $_} | Out-file -FilePath C:\Users\esmith\Desktop\output.txt

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1013

Answers (1)

oɔɯǝɹ
oɔɯǝɹ

Reputation: 7625

net view is a DOS command line, which returns text output. The PowerShell pipeline works on objects instead of text, so that does not combine well in this case. (Technically: strings are objects as well, but not the kind of objects that you expect here).

You can use the native PowerShell cmdlet Get-AdComputer to obtain a list of the domain joined computers as PowerShell objects, which you can then feed into the pipeline.

Something like this should work:

Get-AdComputer -Filter * | ForEach-Object { Get-Printer -ComputerName $_.Name }

The Get-Printer cmdlet does except pipeline input directly, so this should work as well (without the need for an explicit ForEach-Object):

Get-AdComputer -Filter * | Get-Printer

Upvotes: 1

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