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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? – makerofthings7 Oct 21 '10 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). – Evan Anderson Oct 21 '10 at 21:06
+1 Thanks for the additional info! – makerofthings7 Oct 22 '10 at 2:57
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