PowerShell: Copy all AD users of an OU to another OU

Question

I'm trying to copy all users of OU "A" to the OU "B". My PowerShell shot at this is

$sourceEntry = [ADSI]"LDAP://OU=A,DC=demo,DC=com"
$targetEntry = [ADSI]"LDAP://OU=B,DC=demo,DC=com"

$searcher = New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($sourceEntry)
$searcher.Filter = "(objectClass=user)"
$results = $searcher.FindAll()

foreach($result in $results) {
    $user = $result.GetDirectoryEntry()
    $user.CopyTo($targetEntry)
}

My problem is, that $user appears to lack the CopyTo method I try to call. As far as I understand PowerShell, $user is an .NET object of the type System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry ... in Visual Studio I find the method CopyTo ... in PowerShell I find none of it's methods, just properties.

I'm just starting with PowerShell, so please help!

Answer 1

According to this StackOverflow question, you should use the PSBase member of a DirectoryEntry object in order to access all of its methods. Try this:

foreach($result in $results) { 
    $user = $result.GetDirectoryEntry() 
    $user.PSBase.MoveTo($targetEntry) 
}

Answer 2

You can't copy AD users.

You can move them from one place to another, or you can create new users based on existing ones... but in the latter case, you have to supply new user names, passwords and a few other things; it's not as simple as a "copy & paste" operation.

Users are security principals, they must be unique in a given domain; you can't have two "identical" user objects in different OUs.