How to get ALL AD user groups (recursively) with Powershell or other tools?

Question

I'm trying to get ALL the groups a user is member, even the nested ones (recusively), in Powershell I'm using:

(Get-ADUser <username> -Properties MemberOf | Select-Object MemberOf).MemberOf

But it only returns the groups the user is a "direct" member, like you get when using the AD users console. I single list of ALL the groups is very helpful, like the output from "gpresult -r", where it shows ALL the groups the user is a member.

Is there a way to get it from any AD user? (Doesnt need to be exclusively in Powershell, maybe theres another tool that I dont know yet)

Answer 1

You can use the LDAP_MATCHING_RULE_IN_CHAIN:

Get-ADGroup -LDAPFilter "(member:1.2.840.113556.1.4.1941:=CN=User,CN=USers,DC=x)"

You can use it anywahere that you can use an LDAP filter.

Example:

$username = 'myUsername'
$dn = (Get-ADUser $username).DistinguishedName
Get-ADGroup -LDAPFilter ("(member:1.2.840.113556.1.4.1941:={0})" -f $dn) | select -expand Name | sort Name

Answer 2

Or, you can use the constructed attribute tokenGroups and a base-scoped query:

$tokenGroups = Get-ADUser -SearchScope Base -SearchBase '<account-distinguishedName>' `
-LDAPFilter '(objectClass=user)' -Properties tokenGroups | Select-Object `
-ExpandProperty tokenGroups | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Value

Answer 3

Expanding on user2871239 answer about using tokenGroups:

To get all AD object groups recursively:

((Get-ADUser username | Get-ADUser -Properties tokenGroups).tokenGroups | Get-ADGroup).Name

Or, if you don't need an ADGroup object, this returns a String instead, but is way faster:

(Get-ADUser username | Get-ADUser -Properties tokenGroups).tokenGroups.Translate([System.Security.Principal.NTAccount]).Value

It's almost instantaneous in our directory:

PS C:\windows\System32> (Get-ADUser -Filter *).Count
86816
PS C:\windows\System32> (Get-ADGroup -filter *).Count
1808
PS C:\windows\System32> (Get-ADComputer -filter *).Count
2666

Just for reference, here how much time it takes in this instance:

# this returns String objects
1..10 | % {
    Measure-Command {
        (Get-ADUser marcos | Get-ADUser -Properties tokenGroups).tokenGroups.Translate([System.Security.Principal.NTAccount]).Value
    }
} | Measure-Object -Average TotalSeconds | select @{l="Type";e={"String"}},Average

# this returns ADGroup objects
1..10 | % {
    Measure-Command {
        ((Get-ADUser marcossantos | Get-ADUser -Properties tokenGroups).tokenGroups | Get-ADGroup).Name
    }
} | Measure-Object -Average TotalSeconds | select @{l="Type";e={"ADGroup"}},Average

Type       Average
----       -------
String  0.01415692
ADGroup 0.25427236

This also returns nested membership of primaryGroup (usually Domain users), which most solutions does not account for.

One downside of this approach is that it does not retrieve distribution groups. If you need that, following query returns just distribution groups, using LDAP_MATCHING_RULE_IN_CHAIN (way faster than retrieving all groups, though):

Get-ADGroup -LDAPFilter "(&(groupType>=0)(member:1.2.840.113556.1.4.1941:=CN=myuser,OU=MyUsers,DC=example,DC=com))"

tokenGroups
LDAP_MATCHING_RULE_IN_CHAIN
Microsoft page about tokenGroups