Knowledge Base

Support WebCast: WMIC: A New Approach to Managing Windows Infrastructure from a Command Line

Article ID: 325427

Article Last Modified on 12/3/2007

APPLIES TO

Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition (32-bit x86)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (32-bit x86)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit x86)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Web Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, 64-Bit Datacenter Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition
Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition
Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition

This article was previously published under Q325427

Session Summary

The Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) is a command-line interface to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). WMIC provides a simple interface to WMI so that you can take advantage of WMI to manage computers that are running Microsoft Windows. WMIC interoperates with existing shells and utility commands, and can be easily extended by scripts or other administration-oriented programs.

WMIC allows you to define new aliases (friendly names), add output formats, and create and run scripts. With WMIC you can browse the WMI and other like-schema, and query its classes and instances. You can also get information from a local computer, a remote computer, and from multiple computers in a single command.

Being a systems administrator tool, WMIC is more intuitive than WMI, in large part because of aliases. Aliases take simple commands that you enter at the command line, and then act on the WMI namespace in a predefined way, such as constructing a complex WMI Query Language (WQL) command from a simple WMIC alias command. The output is returned as XML documents, which can then be processed by XSL to render reports in multiple formats (including forms, tables, html, process-friendly formats, and CSV).

The presentation will first briefly review the WMIC functionality and architecture, it will then focus on demonstrating the WMIC modes of operation, use of progressive help discovery and report generation. Finally, the customization of the WMIC aliases, transformation and output formats will be explained.

This is a Level 200 session that was recorded July 24, 2002 and presented by Arkady Retik. Arkady Retik is a Program Manager in the Windows Management Instrumentation Group, which is a part of Windows Server Division.

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