Get SamAccountName from Name with Powershell

Have you tried dsquery.exe as it is faster.  Run the following:

squery * -filter "&(objectClass=person)(objectCategory=user)" -attr cn samaccountname -limit 0 > samaccounts.txt

Hi Mohammed ..thank you for the tip .. Ideally I would like it to be PowerShell ..

I see you are using get-qaduser which is using Quest AD modules.  Do you Win2008 or Win2003?  If you have Win2008 or higher, you could try get-aduser which I have found to be faster.

Part of the problem is you're doing 80,000 LDAP sequential LDAP calls. So straight off the bat your efficiency sucks. You would be better off potentially doing 1 single LDAP call and bringing back all of the user accounts with the properties you want. I would do it more like this (I don't use the Quest cmdlets so you will need to modify for those).

$Name = get-content C:\:Powershell\Names.txt
Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties CanonicalName | Where-Object {$Name -contains $_.sAMAccountName} | Select samaccountname,Name,canon* | Export-csv SamAccountnames.csv -nti

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20 minutes for 2,000 users seems excessive though. I would look at the performance of your Domain Controllers or look at using something other than the Quest cmdlets if they perform so slowly (either the PowerShell cmdlets or just .NET LDAP lookup). In my testing I am able to pull back 150,000 objects in 3 minutes using the AD cmdlets and export them to CSV.

Thanks Learnctx ... This is definitely way better .. I appreciate the info ... If I only need the SAmAccountName in the outfile ..

how would you modify your script ?

Thank you .. much better then what I was doing .