5 Scripts for Managing Local Groups

Domain or server local security groups form the backbone of the permission assignments in my development and production environments. I might grant permissions to individual users in a handful of situations, but generally I follow the best practice of granting permissions to groups, then adding user IDs to those groups. To remove a user's access, I just remove the user's account from the group. Scripting can further simplify management of local groups by letting you quickly enumerate the membership of the groups, add and remove members, and modify group properties.

You can use several local group-related utilities—Local, Findgrp, Cusrmgr, MemberOf, and LG—with your command-shell scripts. Table 1 summarizes what you can use these tools for and where you can find them. The following FAQs will help you identify the best tool for specific situations. These FAQs include five handy scripts to demonstrate how to use the tools. The sample scripts don't use every feature of these tools, so you'll want to check each tool's online Help to learn more about the tool's capabilities. You can download these scripts, including instructions for customization, from the Windows Scripting Solutions Web site. . . .