We’ve covered different pieces of WMI in previous posts, but we have yet to discuss the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line (WMIC) in detail. The WMIC provides administrators easy access to the WMI infrastructure. Prior to the WMIC, you could only access the management infrastructure via the providers or an API. Since the ultimate goal of WMI is to make life easier for system and application administrators, this obviously presented a problem.
The WMIC environment allows interactive queries or scripting. It is interoperable with existing shell and utility commands and can be extended by scripts and other administration-oriented applications. WMIC is included with Windows XP and later operating systems. However, since WMIC works locally and remotely, it is possible to run WMIC commands against Windows 2000 systems remotely so long as the particular action is supported by WMI on the target machine. Beyond the ability to use WMIC against local and remote systems, there are other significant benefits
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