WMI Scripting

WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) - Home

Introduction to WMI

Who will benefit from learning about WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) commands? Here are the people who I had in mind as I wrote this section. Network managers who want to collect specific data from one (or more) server. IT professionals who what to know precisely what's happening in their Microsoft operating system. Those techies who love remote control without hassle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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WMI Scripting can be used to retrieve many useful information related to running machine in a very easy way.

Tutorial Learning Points

1) Sometimes simple phrases have a beauty all of their own. Yet, often simple phrases hide all the hard work, what you do not see is all the experiments that did not work and all the extra code that you don't need. Perhaps the best way to re-enforce this theme is to point what NOT to put in the WQL clause.

2) ("Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk where objItem.FreeSpace > 10000"). No need for objItem, just the pure property name. As with all scripting learn to apply the punctuation correctly.

Example 2 - Select only File Systems that are NTFS.

The key WQL clause is where FileSystem = 'NTFS'")

("Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk where FileSystem = 'NTFS'")

Tutorial Learning Points

1) In truth, text filters are harder than numeric filters. The greatest problems are with the speech marks.

("Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk where FileSystem = 'NTFS'"). Again looks easy, but here are some mistakes. Where FileSystem = ' NTFS '". It is outrageous that blank spaces should cause problems - but they do.

2) Here is another error, note the wrong type of speech marks. where FileSystem = "NTFS"". The spacing is correct but NTFS should be bracketed by a pair of single speech marks, the double quotes draws an error message.

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