List all users in a Security Group through PowerShell

We have security groups in Active Directory User and Computers (ADUC). In these security groups, we have users and security groups. If you have security groups in a security group, we call them nested security groups. How to list all users and security groups in a security group through PowerShell? Find out in this article how to list the content through PowerShell.

Get a list of users and security groups

We have a security group with the name SG_Office. We like to list all the users and security groups in that security group. Run PowerShell as administrator. We are going to make use of the Get-ADGroupMember cmdlet.

PS C:\> Get-ADGroupMember -Identity "SG_Office" | Select-Object Name | Sort-Object Name

Name
----
Benetiz Anees
Larson Tevin
SG_Administration
SG_Amsterdam
SG_Communication
SG_Field
SG_Finance
SG_HR
SG_London
SG_Madrid
SG_Paris
SG_Production
SG_Recruiting
SG_Sales

Note: Suppose you get the PowerShell output error that the size limit for this request was exceeded. Read the solution in the article Get-ADGroupMember : The size limit for this request was exceeded.

If you want to confirm, go to ADUC and open the security group SG_Office. Click Members. The exact list of users and security groups will show. You can see that we have two users and more than a couple of security groups.

Now that we have the users and security groups, what if we want to list the users in the nested security groups?

Get a list of users and users in nested security groups

We want to get all the users, including the users in the nested security groups in the security group SG_Office. Let’s sort the list on Display Name.

PS C:\> Get-ADGroupMember -Identity "SG_Office" -Recursive | Get-ADUser -Property DisplayName | Select-Object DisplayName | Sort-Object DisplayName

DisplayName
-----------
Adams Forrest 
Albert Corrie
Beltran Noah 
Benetiz Anees 
Boyce Caoimhe 
Boyce Julie 
Chester Braiden 
Curtis Cari 
Foley Clifford 
Hodgson Leela 
Jones Weronika 
Klein Menna 
Larson Tevin
Lopez Rebeca 
Mack Johanna 
Mcghee Kayne 
Mckinney Vanessa 
Monroe Cara 
Pitts Karina 
Todd Jake 
Wilson Herman 
Woodley Reya

Export the members to CSV file.

This example will export the results to the file members.csv in the C:\temp directory.

PS C:\> Get-ADGroupMember -Identity "SG_Office" -Recursive | Get-ADUser -Property DisplayName | Select-Object DisplayName | Sort-Object DisplayName | Export-Csv C:\temp\members.csv -Encoding UTF8 -NoTypeInformation

That’s it!

Read more: Copy members from one AD group to another »

Conclusion

You learned how to list all users in a security group through PowerShell. It’s good to know that you can get members in groups and nested groups. After that, export the results to a CSV file.

Did you enjoy this article? You may also like the article Add users to group with PowerShell. Don’t forget to follow us and share this article.