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I'm interested in learning how to use WMIC, but I'm confused on where to begin. How does this tool compare to PowerShell? Can Powershell do everything WMIC can... and more?

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PowerShell is a turing-complete scripting language. You can, in theory, write a program in PowerShell to do anything.

WMIC is a command-line program for interacting with WMI. By itself, it has no constructs for branching and looping, variable manipulation, or any of the nice things that a programming language has. It's just a tool, basically, for retrieving or setting values in WMI. Acting programmatically on the output or input of the tool is something that's typically handled by a batch-script that calls the tool.

You can learn more about using the WMIC tool from Microsoft or by Googling phrases like WMIC tutorial. You'll find lots of stuff.

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    Does that mean that Powershell can do everything WMIC can? For example can it execute WMI commands on remote machines with alternate creds? Oct 21, 2010 at 20:54
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    PowerShell 1.0 has some limitations re: authentication when accessing WMI on remote computers (see technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730973.aspx) but that's cleaned-up in PowerShell 2.0. The WMI-related methods and objects in PowerShell 2.0 can allow to perform any type of WMI maniuplation that you could with any other WMI tool (WMIC, VBScript, etc). Oct 21, 2010 at 21:06

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