Test Whether Organizational Unit or Account Exists

Here are two quick functions which I have recently found useful. The first tests whether a user account exists. It takes the Domain and Identity as arguments. Using the “Stop” error action with Try/Catch keeps it from showing any errors. You can do this with any of the AD cmdlets, such as Get-ADOrganizationalUnit, Get-ADComputer and others. The first example tests for the existence of a user account:

Function Test-AccountNameExists($dom, $name){
    Try{
        $u= get-aduser -server $dom -Identity $Name -ErrorAction Stop
        return $true
        }Catch{
        return $false
       }
}

This tests whether an OU exists:

Function Test-OUExists($dom, $OUname){
    Try{$OU= Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -server $dom -Identity $OUName -ErrorAction Stop
        return $true
        }Catch{
        return $false
       }
}