WMI LIKEs Wildcards
You may hear or read that WMI can’t accept wildcards. WRONG
WMI accepts wildcards but not the ones you might expect.
Consider
Get-Process p*
This gets all the process that begin with the letter p
To do something similar with WMI we need to use the –Filter parameter. We can get a single process like this
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Process -Filter "Name='powershell.exe'"
so you may want to try this
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Process -Filter "Name='p*'"
Oops no returns of any kind.
That’s because in the filter we are using WQL which uses the SQL wildcards
% = * multiple characters
_ = ? single character
OK then this will work
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Process -Filter "Name='p%'"
Oh no it won’t because a further complication is that we have to use the WQL LIKE operator not =
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Process -Filter "Name LIKE 'p%'"
And we have a winner
To use the single character wildcard (which in my experience doesn’t get used as much as the multi-character)
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Process -Filter "Name LIKE 'powershell.e_e'"
And as an added bonus the title of the post give us a way to remember to use the LIKE operator.