Clear AD attribute

Published January 27, 2011 Active Directory , AD , AD cmdlets , cmdlets , one-liner , oneliner , PowerShell 6 Comments

Just yesterday a colleague of mine asked me how to undo an Active Directory object property change from the value he erroneously put back to <not set>. It turned out that I never actually blogged about that – so here you go. 🙂

Clearing AD attributes us actually as easy as just setting the value to $null. For example, here’s how you do it for properties which we have exposed in Set- cmdlets parameters:

Set-QADUser 'Amy Hardy' -City $null

Or for more internal attributes:

Set-QADUser 'Amy Hardy' -ObjectAttributes @{adminDescription=$null}

Hope that helps!

6 Responses to “Clear AD attribute”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address

1 AnthonyA March 4, 2013 at 9:16 pm

Finally figured out how to do this without the Quest extensions.
$userobj = [ADSI]”LDAP://cn=myname.OU=People.DC=example,DC=com”
$userobj.put(“description”,@())
$userobj.SetInfo()

The empty array is necessary to clear the description without error, not sure why, but I believe it is because @() actually generates a null array object. $null does not work; it gives you errors.

Reply
2 karthik November 13, 2014 at 12:15 pm

how to do this for multiple users

Reply
- 3 Dmitry Sotnikov November 13, 2014 at 12:22 pm
  
  Pipeline results from Get-QADUser that retrieves the users that you need updated
  
  Reply
4 Francis January 26, 2015 at 8:19 am

thanks a lot!! it really helped me.. i used the following..

Get-QADUser -ObjectAttributes @{extensionAttribute10=’*’} | Set-QADUser -ObjectAttributes @{extensionAttribute10=$null}

Reply
5 Cliff November 15, 2017 at 7:39 am

Again Dmitry saves the day!

Reply