Using and/or operators in powershell command

Question

I want this query to only return enabled users who have a name matching "marketing" or "accounting". However, when I run this it's returning disabled users as well? What am I missing? From my research this is what I came up with but it's not working.

Get-ADuser -filter {(Name -like "*marketing*") -or (Name -like "*accounting*") -and (Enabled -eq "true")} -Properties *

Thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

In Boolean logic in general, AND takes precedence over OR. In other words, AND operations are evaluated first, before OR.

So that command is really asking for accounts where either:

1. The name contains "marketing", or
2. The name contains "accounting" and is enabled

To get the results you want, you need to enclose the entire -or expression in parentheses to force it to evaluate it first, and leave the -and outside the parentheses:

Get-ADuser -Filter {(Name -like "*marketing*" -or Name -like "*accounting*") -and Enabled -eq "true"} -Properties *

As mentioned in the comments above, the documentation tells us that the -Filter parameter is technically a string. So if you give it a script block ( { } ), PowerShell does some translation on it to convert it to a string. Sometimes that translation can go wrong, so you're often better off giving it the string it should be, which would look something like this:

Get-ADuser -Filter "(Name -like '*marketing*' -or Name -like '*accounting*') -and Enabled -eq 'true'" -Properties *