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Here is an easy way of getting a list of computers that have a particular OS type from Active Directory using DSQuery.

dsquery * domainroot -filter “(&(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows XP*))”

The command above would give you a list of all computers that have a Windows XP operating system. For Windows Servers, change the command as follows:

dsquery * domainroot -filter “(&(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows Server*))”

The output of the commands above would look something like this:

samid

server1$

server2$

server3$

dsget succeeded

Note the ‘samid’ at the head and ‘dsget succeeded’ at the end and the ‘$’ at the end tail of every server name.

If you are like me, and you would like just get a nice clean output with only server names, you can run this command:

for /f “Tokens=1 delims=$” %a in (‘dsquery * domainroot -filter “(&(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows Server*))”^| dsget computer -samid^|find /V “samid” ^| find /V “dsget”‘) do echo %a

The output of the command shown above would be:

server1

server2

server3

… and can be used as input to a file or another command etc…

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