Aliases
Updated: January 21, 2005
Aliases are intermediary facilitators that help you access the WMI infrastructure when you are running WMIC. Aliases are friendly names used to capture the features of a WMI class that are relevant to some specific task such as disk or network administration.
Aliases can be used to provide:
- Clearer names for WMI classes, properties, and method.
- Useful output formats of arranged properties.
The output formats can include specific property values or can be formatted in a manner appropriate to some specific presentation strategy or function. For example, an alias might have a "BRIEF" format that will list only property values essential for the identification of the objects visible through the alias. Management data is retrieved in XML format and processed by built-in or custom XSL output formats. For more information, see Creating and editing formats in WMIC .
WMIC provides aliases for the most commonly used classes of management information. You can add aliases for other classes. Thus, aliases in WMIC may be of the following types:
-
Default aliases in the root\cli namespace.
- For a list of aliases included with WMIC, type /? at the WMIC command prompt.
- For more information about a specific alias, type: alias_name /?
- For more information about alias schema, type: Alias alias_name list brief
- Aliases added by you in the root\cli namespace.
- Aliases defined by you in other namespaces. If you define aliases in other namespaces, you must use the /ROLE switch to specify the namespace when using it with WMIC. For more information, see Creating and editing aliases .
For information about WMI security, see Managing WMI security .
For information about WMIC security, see Security with WMIC .
For more information, see Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line .