Windows Tip Sheet
Net Some Groups
Use the Net group command to give you network Who's Who.
- By Jeffery Hicks
- 04/18/2007
I showed you how to use the venerable Net user command to get some fast
information about local and domain user accounts
last
week. One piece of information from the Net User command that's real
helpful is group membership. To see who else might be in one of those
groups you can use another Net command.
If the user account is local, say on a member server, and you saw that
it belonged to the Administrators group, then run this command:
Net localgroup administrators
and you'll see all the members of this group. By the way, domain controllers
also have built-in local groups like Account Operators and Server Operators,
not to mention administrators. To check these group memberships, you can
still use net localgroup but you need to add
the /domain switch like this:
Net localgroup "server operators" /domain
and you'll need to enclose in quotes the group name if it has a space.
But what about domain groups that the user belongs to? For that, you
can use Net group. If you happen to be on the domain controller you can
simply type:
Net group "domain users"
But you don't need to go to a domain controller. You can get this information
from your desktop by using -- what else? -- /domain:
Net group "Enterprise Admins" /domain
If you want to see a list of all local groups or all domain groups, all
you need are these commands:
Net localgroup
Net localgroup /domain
Net group /domain
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There are some limitations. You can't easily control the output formatting.
The Net group command also doesn't understand organizational units. Yet,
if you want a fast list of who is in a particular group, either local
or domain, you can't go wrong with this oldie but still a goodie.
About the Author
Jeffery Hicks is an IT veteran with over 25 years of experience, much of it spent as an IT infrastructure consultant specializing in Microsoft server technologies with an emphasis in automation and efficiency. He is a multi-year recipient of the Microsoft MVP Award in Windows PowerShell. He works today as an independent author, trainer and consultant. Jeff has written for numerous online sites and print publications, is a contributing editor at Petri.com, and a frequent speaker at technology conferences and user groups.