Active Directory: Copy a Group Members to a new Group

--Anand-- Active Directory April 12, 2011May 26, 2011 1 Minute

How would you copy the members (including users and groups) of GROUP-A to another group (GROUP-B)? I figured that out today.

Open Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell in Administrative Tools and type the following command.

Get-ADGroupMember -Identity GROUP-A | Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership -MemberOf GROUP-B

Get-ADGroupMember gets all the members of GROUP-A and pipes into Add-ADPrincipalGroupMembership cmdlet that added the incoming members to GROUP-B.

Published by --Anand--

Being in Silicon Valley for years, I became a IT Infrastructure Geek by experience and surrounded by other Geeks everywhere. I try to help others by the solutions I found on odd occasions. View all posts by --Anand--

Published April 12, 2011May 26, 2011

10 thoughts on “Active Directory: Copy a Group Members to a new Group”

Chris says:

June 24, 2013 at 7:13 pm

Thanks for posting this. Saved me a ton of time creating new groups with some minor adjustments. However, ran this through PowerShell 3 (as administrator) and it work just fine – did not have to use the AD Module for Windows Powershell.

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Ruben says:

January 16, 2014 at 2:23 pm

Thanks a lot!!! 🙂

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marcelo says:

March 12, 2014 at 5:53 am

Thanks for the tip. It saved me a lot of time.

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nap says:

March 28, 2014 at 5:12 pm

Thanks for posting this. Saved me a ton of time creating new groups with some minor adjustments

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jasmin974 says:

April 23, 2014 at 5:53 am

Thank you.

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wood2040 says:

July 29, 2015 at 8:44 pm

This works great, but only if the users in the results of the ‘Get-ADGroupMember’ are not members of a child domain. Is there a way to allow this to work for the entire directory?

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j1 says:

February 25, 2016 at 4:17 pm

Excellent – worked like a treat! Tho ‘ as I had to run PowerShell as Administrator before it worked!

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Joel Tome says:

April 26, 2016 at 12:23 am

Is there a Power Shell way to add a list of user ID’s to a GROUP on the Windows Active Directory “UNIX Attributes” tab?

I already entered the users on the GROUP MEMBERS tab, but now, I’m learning that I also have to list them again on the “UNIX Attributes” tab for our application to work. Any suggestions?

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Srinivasan says:

November 3, 2016 at 10:07 am

Thanks for this, do you have a script that will add AD users within a parent group as well as the users of sub groups within that Parent group recursively to another AD group?

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