Powershell – Editing XML files from powershell

Figured it out myself. Because Powershell works with .net objects rather than text, you need to use get-content to expose the contents of the text files. So to perform what I was trying to do in the question, use:

compare-object (get-content one.txt) (get-content two.txt)

There are two problems here.

1. The CMDlet Get-QADPermission is writing directly to the console during execution which is why you're seeing Permissions for: .... Since your pipeline is writing to the same output, it all gets mixed together. Store the output from your pipeline to a variable instead.

2. When you pipe the group into Get-QADPermission, you're throwing away the group object and getting a permissions object instead. If you want to keep the original object, you need to filter with Where-Object.

Also, be careful with Get-QADPermission. If you only query for WriteProperty, it won't return results with both Read+Write access. Usually you want to query for both. And in most cases, you also want to use -Inherited to get permissions granted from parent OU's. If you're really looking for once-off permissions, then you can ignore this switch.

function Test-UserCanModifyGroupsInOU ($Username, $OU)
{
  $results = Get-QADGroup -SearchScope 'OneLevel' -SearchRoot $OU |
    Where-Object {
      $_ | Get-QADPermission -Rights ReadProperty,WriteProperty -Property member -Account $username
    } |
    Select @{Name="User";Expression={$username}}, @{Name="Group";Expression={$_.Name}}
  $results | Write-Output
  $results | Export-Csv "$username.csv"
}

@("bob","sally") |
  ForEach-Object {
    Test-UserCanModifyGroupsInOU -Username $_ -OU 'domain.org.com/path/to/OU'
  }

Also note that this only works for permissions on specific properties. It won't return results for a user that has "Full Control" on the group, even though they're stil allowed to modify the member attribute.