Invoking WMI class methods

WMI methods enable you to execute different activities on a system. PowerShell provides the ability to hook onto these methods to perform different actions using the invoke-cimmethod cmdlet. In order to determine what methods are available for use in a WMI class, you can leverage the get-cimclass cmdlet, with the optional –class parameter pointing to a WMI class. You then can pipe those results to the selection criteria of | select -ExpandProperty CimClassMethods. This will display all the methods and properties for those methods in that WMI class. This will help you expose what methods are available for a particular class.

To leverage the get-cimclass cmdlet to see the methods in the win32_process class, you can do the following:

get-cimclass win32_process | select –ExpandProperty CimClassMethods

The output of this command is shown in the following screenshot:

There are two popular ways to utilize the invoke-cimmethod cmdlet. The first is to use the -MethodName parameter...