{"id":7231,"date":"2007-09-24T18:50:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-24T18:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/powershell\/2007\/09\/24\/get-wmihelp-amp-search-wmihelp\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T13:16:31","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T20:16:31","slug":"get-wmihelp-amp-search-wmihelp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/get-wmihelp-amp-search-wmihelp\/","title":{"rendered":"Get-WmiHelp & Search-WmiHelp"},"content":{"rendered":"

Both PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) are pretty incredible technologies that can do a lot of amazing things, but we’re all human, and keeping an encyclopedic mental reference of all of these amazing things would give Good Will Hunting a headache.  For years, when I used WMI I almost always had a browser open to MSDN to help me figure out and remember the little details of a class in WMI, and, for all of the desktop clutter, it never bothered me… until I started using Powershell and had Get-Help and Get-Command.<\/span><\/p>\n

These two cmdlets rocked my world.  Get-Command could tell me all of the commands in a system, and the properties they accepted.  Get-Help told me what the cmdlet did, and how to use it.  All of a sudden I had the kinds of information I was always looking up online right at my fingertips… but not for WMI.<\/span><\/p>\n

Luckily, it turns out that WMI actually has a way to provide help information.  If you run Get-WmiObject, you can see what I mean:<\/span><\/p>\n

 Get-WmiObject __Namespace | Format-Table Name<\/span><\/p>\n

This lists the namespaces underneath root\\cimv2.  You should have at least one namespace named something like ms_### .  This namespace contains localized class help for the WMI classes in the parent namespace.<\/span><\/p>\n

This means that no matter where in the world you are, you can get help from WMI in your language without connecting to the internet.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wrote a few functions to make this feature of WMI a lot easier to access. <\/span><\/p>\n

Get-WmiHelp: Gets you a dictionary with the help for a specific WMI class
Search-WmiHelp: Searches through the namespace for classes that match certain filters<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are some examples:<\/span><\/p>\n

Get-WmiHelp Win32_Process<\/span><\/p>\n

Name                           Value
—-                               —–
Description                    The Win32_Process class represents a sequence…
Properties                     {QuotaPeakPagedPoolUsage, CSCreationClassName…
Methods                       {Terminate, AttachDebugger, Create, GetOwner…}<\/span><\/p>\n

(Get-WmiHelp Win32_Bios).Description<\/span><\/p>\n

The Win32_BIOS class represents the attributes of the computer system’s basic input\/output services (BIOS) that are installed on the computer.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Get-WmiHelp Win32_Process).Methods.Create<\/span><\/p>\n

The Create method creates a new process.
The method returns an integer value that can be interpretted as follows:
0 – Successful completion.
2 – The user does not have access to the requested information.
3 – The user does not have sufficient privilge.
8 – Unknown failure.
9 – The path specified does not exist.
21 – The specified parameter is invalid.
Other – For integer values other than those listed above, refer to Win32 error code documentation.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Get-WmiHelp Win32_Volume).Properties.StatusInfo<\/span><\/p>\n

StatusInfo is a string indicating whether the logical device is in an enabled (value = 3), disabled (value = 4) or some other (1) or unknown (2) state. If thi
s property does not apply to the logical device, the value, 5 (“Not Applicable”), should be used. <\/span><\/p>\n

Search-WmiHelp {$_ -like “*Disk*”} # Finds all classes whose description contains “Disk”<\/span><\/p>\n

Name                                          Value
—-                                               —–
Win32_OperatingSystemAutoch… {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_Volume                             {Description, Properties, Methods}
….<\/span><\/p>\n

Search-WmiHelp -Method {$_.Key -like “*Create*} # Finds all classes that contain a method named create<\/span><\/p>\n

Name                              Value
—-                                   —–
Win32_Service                 {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_BaseService          {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_TerminalService     {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_Share                   {Description, Properties, Methods}<\/span><\/p>\n

…<\/span><\/p>\n

Search-WmiHelp -Property {$_.Value -like “*Quota*} # Finds all classes that contain a property whose description contains “Quota”<\/span><\/p>\n

Name                                  Value
—-                                       —–
Win32_QuotaSetting             {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_LogicalDisk               {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_VolumeQuota            {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_VolumeUserQuota     {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_Process                   {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_MappedLogicalDisk   {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_Volume                    {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_VolumeQuotaSetting {Description, Properties, Methods}
Win32_DiskQuota                {Description, Properties, Methods} <\/span><\/p>\n

 Hope this helps,<\/span><\/p>\n

 James Brundage [MSFT]<\/span><\/p>\n

—<\/span><\/p>\n

Update: I have added a -Culture option to Get-WmiHelp and Search-WmiHelp.  If Search-WmiHelp is giving you an “Invalid Namespace” error, then run:<\/span><\/p>\n

 Get-WmiObject “__Namespace” | Format-List Name<\/span> and try passing the value of any ms_### namespace to Get-WmiHelp\/Search-WmiHelp<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span>e.g. Get-WmiHelp Win32_Process -culture 0xc0a:<\/span><\/p>\n

Name                           Value
—-                           —–
Description                    La clase Win32_Process representa una secuenc…
Properties                     {QuotaPeakPagedPoolUsage, CSCreationClassName…
Methods                        {Terminate, AttachDebugger, Create, GetOwner…} <\/span><\/p>\n

Add-WmiHelpFunctions.ps1<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Both PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) are pretty incredible technologies that can do a lot of amazing things, but we’re all human, and keeping an encyclopedic mental reference of all of these amazing things would give Good Will Hunting a headache.  For years, when I used WMI I almost always had a browser open to MSDN to help me figure out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":600,"featured_media":13641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-7231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-powershell","tag-wmi"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Both PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) are pretty incredible technologies that can do a lot of amazing things, but we’re all human, and keeping an encyclopedic mental reference of all of these amazing things would give Good Will Hunting a headache.  For years, when I used WMI I almost always had a browser open to MSDN to help me figure out […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/powershell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}