Find all hidden network shares

I have a Windows file server with thousands of shares. Occasionally, create hidden shares for data migration or other administrative tasks. How do you find these shares?

Some websites suggest running Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Share and piping the output of that to Where-Object to filter. That can work, but it has the computer send you all the share objects. If you want to run this command to get shares from a remote computer, this is highly inefficient.

Instead, we can specify a filter in the initial Get- cmdlet. I’m also going to switch to the Get-CimInstance cmdlet, which is optimized for remote execution.

PS Z:\> Get-CimInstance -ComputerName ServerName -ClassName Win32_Share -Filter 'Type = "0" AND Name LIKE "%$"'

The Filter parameter uses a WQL query to specific that I want regular shares (not administrative shares like C$ or IPC$;Â see the Win32_Share class doc for details) AND whose names end with a dollar sign. It may not return data much faster, but it sends much less data over the wire, which is important especially for remote scenarios.

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