I'm somewhat of a powershell newbie here, so I apologize if this is a ridiculous question:  Why does the printer name of a network printer show up as "\\\\printserver.domain.com\\printername" when using get-wmiobject win32_printer?

Why all the extra "\"?

This had me confused for the longest time as I was writing a script to remove printers and re-add different ones...  I now have it working, but still have no idea why the extra slashes are added.  Any pointers would be greatly appreciated, i hate not knowing the "why".  :)

#please post you script and show your code, because I can't see the output like yours mine is:

Get-WmiObject win32_printer -ComputerName PCNAME | ft name

name
----
Microsoft XPS Document Writer
Microsoft Office Document Image Writer
Canon CP660PS

Say I run the following:

Get-WMIObject -query "select * from win32_printer"

Now that will return a printer name of say "\\printserver1\printer1"

However if you try to run:

Get-WMIObject -query "select * from win32_printer where name = '\\printserver1\printer1'"

It can't find the device.... You have to add in additional "\" for it to work as noted above:

Get-WMIObject -query "select * from win32_printer where name = '\\\\printserver1\\printer1'"

And prints off your server just fine. I just don't understand why the name reports as \\printserver1\printer1 when in reality it can't be removed unless you use \\\\printserver1\\printer1

Hope that makes more sense.

#this is my output
Get-WMIObject -query "select * from win32_printer"


Location      :
Name          : NPIF94A0D (HP LaserJet P2055dn)
PrinterState  : 0
PrinterStatus : 3
ShareName     :
SystemName    : PC1

Location      :
Name          : Adobe PDF
PrinterState  : 0
PrinterStatus : 3
ShareName     :
SystemName    : PC2

Please post your "$host.version" command output

This is just a problem with PowerShell's interfacing to other query languages ;-)
In PowerShell, the backtick is the escape character: `

But in WQL (WMI Query Language, which you're using in Get-WMIObject) and in regular expressions, and a few other places, the implementation of WMI/WQL and regex is out of the hands of the PowerShell team, being built into the OS or the .Net framework.

In those cases, the actual query strings use the backslash \ as the escape character, which means that when you want to include a backslash in the text, you have to escape it (with a preceeding backslash). So your output should be "right" and show one slash (or two at the beginning), but your query has to be escaped (so all the slashed get doubled up).

I guess we should just be glad we don't have to do that with all our PSProvider paths ;-)

Thank you!  That makes sense.   The more I learn about powershell and it's capabilities, the more I love it....

We're now running a production login script to map client printers based on AD security groups using powershell...  Works like a charm!  :)