Get OU Distinguished Name

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Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

There are many reasons as to why you would need to identify an Active Directory Organisational Unit’s Distinguished Name.

Most techies out there will use an AD distinguished name when writing or using PowerShell scripts.

However, quickly finding what the Distinguished name of a particular OU is not immediately clear. You can click on the object tab for information, but not the distinguished name.

Using PowerShell to get the Distinguished Name

The simple solution on how to quickly find an OU’s distinguished name is to use PowerShell itself.

The information you will need first is:

OU Name
AD Integration for PowerShell

That’s it – once you have this, you can go ahead and run the below PowerShell script:

Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -Filter 'Name -like "*"' | Format-Table Name, DistinguishedName -A

The only part you need to change in this PowerShell script is the * wildcard. If you leave it as a wildcard, it will bring back the distinguished name for all of your OU’s.

To bring back just one particular OU distinguished name, then change this * wildcard to the name of your OU.

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