WMI CookBook: WMI Presentation
As with other PowerShell objects there is a default format for the display of WMI objetcs. If we look at the NetworkAdapter class
PS> Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_NetworkAdapter -Filter "DeviceId='11'"
ServiceName : athr
MACAddress : 00:00:00:00:00:00
AdapterType : Ethernet 802.3
DeviceID : 11
Name : Atheros AR5007 802.11b/g WiFi Adapter
NetworkAddresses :
Speed : 54000000
You didn’t think I’d really give you my MAC address did you?
If we want to see all of the properties we can do this
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_NetworkAdapter -Filter "DeviceId='11'" | select -Property *
but we get a few ugly looking entries
__GENUS
__CLASS
__SUPERCLASS
__DYNASTY
__RELPATH
__PROPERTY_COUNT
__DERIVATION
__SERVER
__NAMESPACE
__PATH
that we may not actually want or need.
We can easily filter them out if desired
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_NetworkAdapter -Filter "DeviceId='11'" | select -Property * -ExcludeProperty "__*"
The ExcludeProperty takes a wild card to identify the properties with two underscore characters at the front.
Simple but effective.