What can I do about "WMIC is deprecated"?

Question

I've been relying on these two commands: ``` wmic memorychip get capacity // Outputs how much RAM there is (in a convoluted manner). wmic diskdrive get Status,Model // Checks whether the HDDs/SSDs on the system are (supposedly) still "OK" and working. ``` Today, I casually typed "wmic" to see if I could get JSON output to the above commands. The first thing it printed, in red text, was this: ``` WMIC is deprecated. ``` I was pretty shocked by this. It's deprecated? Alright... Then I definitely should not be relying on it. What are the "modern alternatives" for those two commands, then? Do they even exist? Why do they just tell us that it's "deprecated" with zero further information?

Accepted Answer

As mentioned in comments, WMIC is utility that acts as interface to communication with WMI. It's not WMI itself that is being deprecated, but "just" the interface. Since Microsoft is pushing PowerShell, I believe official successor wmic would be PowerShell commandlet `Get-WmiObject`. How to use this can be found on Microsoft documentation: LINK

[UPDATED] As correctly pointed out within comment, commandlet `Get-WmiObject` may eventually sunset one day as well and thus its use may not be encouraged to have scripts future proof. Best method to stick with would be `Get-CimInstance`, which has pretty much the same syntax as `Get-WmiObject`. See Microsoft documentation: LINK

For your particular case PowerShell alternative would be the following:

wmic memorychip get capacity

```
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PhysicalMemory | Select-Object capacity
```

wmic diskdrive get Status,Model

```
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_diskdrive | Select-Object status, model
```

Commands in `wmic` are usually derived from WMI class names, but it's not really a rule of thumb. With PowerShell you are accessing WMI by its real class name instead, so you may need to seek for other classes if needed.

As mentioned in comment by Bacon Bits. WMIC aliases to real WMI classes can be obtained by command:

```
wmic.exe alias list brief
```

Undisputed advantage to `PowerShell` over `wmic` is that output is an object and you can easily continue working with the output, while wmic returns a string only that you eventually need to parse for example if used inside scripts and that brings another benefit of e.g. output formatting - you can easily reformat any output for example to as you mentioned JSON, just pass your command through another pipe into commandlet `ConvertTo-Json` and you will have your expected output.

Example:

```
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_diskdrive | select status, model | ConvertTo-JSON
```

Output:

```
{
    "status":  "OK",
    "model":  "SAMSUNG MZNTY256HDHP-000L7"
}
```

Hope this helps

[UPDATE 2.2.2022] Since this is the first link on Google for this topic that pops out, here's small update:

Microsoft officially informed about wmic being deprecated in their WMIC documentation

Microsoft page quotes:

The WMI command-line (WMIC) utility is deprecated as of Windows 10, version 21H1, and as of the 21H1 semi-annual channel release of Windows Server. This utility is superseded by Windows PowerShell for WMI. This deprecation applies only to the WMI command-line (WMIC) utility; Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) itself is not affected.

For the sake of future proof scripts, I would still stick with industrial CIM standard using PowerShell

What can I do about "WMIC is deprecated"?

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