I ran across a scenario where I needed to log off a user from a number of computers without knowing which computers they were logged into. The best way I found to do this programmatically was to use the quser (query user) and logoff commands. Unfortunately, the quser command outputs each record as a string. It would be nice if this was a PowerShell object so each property is easily accessible.

I ran across a few solutions when looking online, and while they all worked, they seemed overly complicated for something which ConvertFrom-Csv should be able to handle easily. Let’s dig in!

The output of quser looks like this:

USERNAME              SESSIONNAME        ID  STATE   IDLE TIME  LOGON TIME
randomnote1           console             1  Active      none   8/14/2019 6:52 AM

This is a nicely formatted table. However in order to access the USERNAME and ID fields, some string processing needs to occur. To prepare for this, set the output of quser to a variable.

$quserResult = quser /server:sqlserver01 2>&1

Now process each line of the result with using a regular expression (regex). In this case, it appears that there are a minimum of two spaces separating each column. Therefore, use a regex which replaces two or more consecutive spaces with a comma.

$quserRegex = $quserResult | ForEach-Object -Process { $_ -replace '\s{2,}',',' }
$quserRegex

This produces the following output:

USERNAME,SESSIONNAME,ID,STATE,IDLE TIME,LOGON TIME
randomnote1,console,1,Active,none,8/14/2019 6:52 AM

Now that the results are in a familiar CSV format, ConvertFrom-CSV can be used to create a PowerShell object from the quser results.

$quserObject = $quserRegex | ConvertFrom-CSV
$quserObject

The results are a familiar object which can be used just like any other object in PowerShell.

USERNAME              SESSIONNAME        ID  STATE   IDLE TIME  LOGON TIME
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
randomnote1           console             1  Active      none   8/14/2019 6:52 AM

Finally, the record with the desired username can be selected and the user can be logged off.

$userSession = $quserObject | Where-Object -FilterScript { $_.USERNAME -eq 'randomnote1' }
logoff $userSession.ID /server:sqlserver01

There you have it! Using a simple regex allowed the native PowerShell cmdlet `ConvertFrom-Csv’ to do it’s job.