PowerShell Get-NetAdapter

List Your Network Adapters with PowerShell 3.0

PowerShell 3.0 introduces a new family of NetAdapter of cmdlets.  Get-NetAdapter is the default, and its job is to enumerate your computer’s network cards (NICs).

Tutorial for Get-NetAdapter

• The Magic of PowerShell’s NetAdapter
• Simple Example of Get-NetAdapter
• Research NetAdapter Properties
• How to Enable or Disabled Your NIC
• Research The NetAdapter Cmdlet Family

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The Magic of PowerShell’s NetAdapter

To appreciate the elegance of Get-NetAdapter, you have to experienced the uglyness of enumerating network cards using NetSh or VBScript; even with PowerShell 2.0’s Get-WmiObject Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration it wasn’t easy to list NICs.

One aspect of elegance that I admire, especially in scripting, is simplicity.  Therefore to get started all you need is the command: Get-NetAdapter.

Simple Example of Get-NetAdapter

Note 1:  You can find more properties by piping the output into | Get-Member.

Research NetAdapter Properties

Important: Adjust the value of my $Nic variable depending on the results of the simple: Get-NetAdapter command.

Note 2:  Take care with the ` backtick; in particular avoid spaces after this command that tells PowerShell to word-wrap to the next line.

Note 3:  Here is an even better plan, research your own properties with:
Get-NetAdapter | Get-Member

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Understanding Get-NetAdapter’s Parameters

Employing the -name parameter is a precise method for specifying the network card, and it saves me having to use Powershell’s Where-Object statement to filter the network cards.

Let us call for Get-Help and see which other parameters are available for the Get-NetAdapter cmdlet.

Results: I found two interesting parameters -IncludeHidden and -physical.

Research Microsoft’s NetAdapter Cmdlet Family

Once you have discovered a useful PowerShell cmdlet such as Get-NetAdapter it’s worth investigating alternative verbs; this is how I discovered Enable, Disable and Restart-NetAdapter.

How to Enable or Disabled Your NIC

Here is an example to disable the Wi-Fi’s network adapter.

Note 4:  To reverse the action substitute Enable-NetAdapter for Disable-Network adapter.

Note 5:  See more on PowerShell’s Disable-NetAdapter.

NetAdapter Challenge

PowerShell’s default verb is ‘Get’.  Thus, my challenge is to substitute plain NetAdapter for Get-NetAdapter in the above examples.  Actually, I regard this shortcut as sloppy scripting, but it does explain why other PowerShell commands work the way they do, for example:
Help Disable-NetAdapter
… is really ‘Get-Help’ Disable-NetAdapter, but as ‘Get’ is the default verb, the shorter form works.

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Getting Started With PowerShell v 3.0

• Launch PowerShell (Preferably the ISE version)
• Copy the lines of code in the above examples (into memory).
• Right-click in the top pane.
• Paste.

More PowerShell v 3.0 Networking Cmdlets

One way to discover more about the new version 3 cmdlets is to look at the ‘Modules’ section of PowerShell ISE’s Commands pane.

See more examples of PowerShell v 3.0 NetAdapter cmdlets »

Summary of PowerShell Get-NetAdapter

PowerShell 3.0 introduces a new family of NetAdapter cmdlets which manipulate a computer’s NICs.  This page shows you how to research the properties of your network card(s).

See more Microsoft PowerShell v 3.0 examples

• PowerShell 3.0  • What’s New in PowerShell 3.0  • PowerShell v 3.0 ISE  • PowerShell Home

• Get-NetAdapter  • Disable-NetAdapter  • Enable-NetAdapter  • Get-NetIPConfiguration

• PowerShell Network Cmdlets  • PowerShell 3.0 Logon Script  • PowerShell Show-Command