Get-ADUser -Identity

Question

Unable to pass a variable to the Identity parameter in Powershell.

$username = "John.Doe"
Get-ADUser -Identity "$username"

Get-ADUser : Cannot find an object with identity: 'John.Doe' under: 'DC=contoso,DC=com'.
At line:1 char:1
+ Get-ADUser -Identity "$username"
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (John.Doe:ADUser) [Get-ADUser], ADIdentityNotFoundException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : ActiveDirectoryCmdlet:Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.ADIdentityNotFoundException,M
   icrosoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.Commands.GetADUser

If I just put Get-ADUser -Identity "John.Doe" the results come back just fine.

Answer 1

The -Identity parameter accepts the following:

• A distinguished name
• A GUID (objectGUID)
• A security identifier (objectSid)
• A SAM account name (sAMAccountName)

If you want to search based on another attribute, then you need to use the -Filter switch. For example, to find user based on UserPrincipalName, you can do the following:

Get-ADUser -Filter "UserPrincipalName -eq 'John.Doe@contoso.com'"

See Get-ADUser for more details.

Answer 2

I know it is old question but It might be the answer. It might help some one down the line. I came across the same issue and it stumped me 1 hour. Finally I used $username = $username.trim() . So obviously the variable has space which need to be trimmed.