Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I list all the user profiles on a computer? — GN

Hey, GN. You want to know a secret? We hate questions about user profiles. It’s not that we have anything against user profiles. The problem is that user profiles represent an important part of a system administrator’s duties, and because of that everyone assumes that there must be all sorts of really cool scripting technologies that make it easy to manage user profiles. In turn, that means everyone ends up disappointed when we Scripting Guys have to break the bad news: there aren’t any really cool scripting technologies that make it easy to manage user profiles.

Hey, no need to be embarrassed: we cried the first time we heard the news, too. But listen, all is not lost. There might not be a really cool scripting technology dedicated to user profiles, but there are workarounds that enable us to accomplish some of the more common management tasks related to user profiles. And one of those workarounds allows us to list all the user profiles found on a computer.

As it turns out, you can find a list of all the user profiles in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE portion of the registry; more specifically, you can find them listed under this registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

That’s the good news. The bad news is that you don’t get a nice, neat list of user profiles; instead, you see a series of separate registry subkeys, each one named after a user’s SID (Security Identifier). To determine the actual user profiles found on a computer we need to iterate through each of those individual subkeys and read the value of ProfileImagePath; as shown in the following screenshot, ProfileImagePath gives us the path to the profile and, by extension, the name of the user that the profile belongs to:

For a larger, easier-to-read version of this graphic click here.

So how do we iterate through all these subkeys and read the value of ProfileImagePath? Well, as we almost always do any time we’re faced with a scripting issue that involves the registry, we turn to WMI:

On Error Resume Next

Const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002

strComputer = “.”

Set objRegistry=GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & _ strComputer & “\root\default:StdRegProv”)

strKeyPath = “SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList” objRegistry.EnumKey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, arrSubkeys

For Each objSubkey In arrSubkeys strValueName = “ProfileImagePath” strSubPath = strKeyPath & “\” & objSubkey objRegistry.GetExpandedStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strSubPath,strValueName,strValue Wscript.Echo strValue Next

Don’t worry: we’ll explain how this all works. We begin by defining a constant named HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and assigning it the value &H80000002; we’ll use this constant later on to indicate the part of the registry we want to work with. We then connect to the WMI service, specifying the path to the StdRegProv class (note that this is found in the root\default namespace).

After that we store the registry path (SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList) in the variable strKeyPath, then use the EnumKey method to return a collection of all the subkeys found under ProfileList (as we’ve already determined, these subkeys – each one named after a user SID – represent all the user profiles found on the computer). Note that the EnumKey method takes three parameters:

If we wanted to we could list all the subkey names by using code similar to this:

For Each objSubkey In arrSubkeys
     Wscript.Echo objSubkey
Next

So why don’t we do that? Well, remember, these subkeys are named after user SIDs; simply listing the subkey names will return data similar to this:

S-1-5-18
S-1-5-19
S-1-5-20
S-1-5-21-1229272821-920026266-1060284298-1003
S-1-5-21-1229272821-920026266-1060284298-1005
S-1-5-21-1229272821-920026266-1060284298-1009
S-1-5-21-1454471165-1004336348-1606980848-8183

Interesting, but not very informative. (Unless, of course, you usually call people by their SID rather than by their name.)

Instead, what we need to do is connect to each of these registry subkeys and read the value of ProfileImagePath; that’s what we do with these lines of code:

For Each objSubkey In arrSubkeys
    strValueName = "ProfileImagePath"
    strSubPath = strKeyPath & "\" & objSubkey
    objRegistry.GetExpandedStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strSubPath,strValueName,strValue
    Wscript.Echo strValue
Next

No, it’s not too hard. We start off by defining a variable named strValueName and assigning it the value ProfileImagePath; this is the name of the individual registry value we want to read. We then take our original registry path (SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList) and tack on a \ and the name of the first subkey in our collection (for example, S-1-5-18). That will give us a path to that first subkey, something similar to this:

SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S-1-5-18

Now that we know the path to the registry value we can use the GetExpandedStringValue method to read the value of ProfileImagPath. Why GetExpandedStringValue? Well, ProfileImagePath happens to be an expanded string value; it contains information similar to this:

%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\TestUser

The GetExpandedStringValue method will automatically replace a variable like %SystemDrive% with the actual value (e.g., C:). Thus we end up with output similar to this:

C:\Documents and Settings\TestUser

As long as we’re on the subject, note that GetExpandedStringValue requires four parameters:

When we run the script we’ll get back data similar to this:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile
C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService
C:\Documents and Settings\NetworkService
C:\Documents and Settings\kenmyer
C:\Documents and Settings\TestUser
C:\Documents and Settings\packerman

Much better.

Incidentally, if all we wanted was the user name (for example, kenmyer) we could get fancy and use the VBScript Split function to separate the user name (the last item in the path) from the rest of the output. But that’s something we’ll leave for you to try on your own. (But if you need a hint for how to work with the Split function take a peek at this Hey, Scripting Guy! column.)