Extracting only date portion from LastLogonDate

Question

I want to be able to isolate the date from the output of this Get-ADUser command:

Get-ADUser -identity johnd -properties LastLogonDate | Select-Object name, Last         


        

Answer 1

The result of that cmdlet is an object with a set of properties. The output you see in table format is not what is literally contained in the object; it's a display representation of it.

So to first get the date object only, you can modify your Select-Object call (which is already paring down the properties) like this:

$lastLogon = Get-ADUser -identity johnd -properties LastLogonDate | 
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty LastLogonDate

$lastLogon now contains a [DateTime] object.

With that you can format it using format strings:

$lastLogon.ToString('MM/dd/yyyy')

Or even better:

$lastLogon.ToShortDateString()

(these are slightly different representations; the latter doesn't zero-pad).

The format strings give you complete control over the representation.