Managing Windows Local Groups with PowerShell

[scottalanmiller]

As with local users, we can manage local groups with PowerShell in a "PowerShell way" today. The commands for managing local users are part of the LocalAccounts commandlet, the same one that we use for managing local users.

It is important to note that these commandlets are not part of PowerShell proper and are not available in all PowerShell versions. Also, while this is the "PowerShell way" to do user management, older methods like the net commands are stand alone utilities and work equally well from PowerShell as from any other calling method.

List Local Groups

Get-LocalGroup

Get Details of Specific Local Group

Get-LocalGroupMember -Name administrators

Add Local User to a Local Group

Add-LocalGroupMember -Group administrators -Member sally 

or you can have a comma delimited list of users...

Add-LocalGroupMember -Group administrators -Member sally, john, buck, mack, hank, betty

Add an Active Directory Domain User to a Local Group

Add-LocalGroupMember -Group administrators -Member "mydomain\roberta" 

Create a New Local Group

New-LocalGroup -Name mynewgroup 

Delete a Local Group

Remove-LocalGroup -Name mynewgroup 

Rename a Local Group

Rename-LocalGroup -Name mynewgroup -NewName myrenamedgroup

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Part of a series on Windows Systems Administration by Scott Alan Miller