CL-WMI is a package for making WMI querys and manipulating the results in Common Lisp. It accesses the .NET platform using the RDNZL library, which must first be installed on your system. The source files can be found at http://weitz.de/rdnzl/

If you use quicklisp, it is advisable to put the RDNZL Lisp files in your quicklisp/local-projects directory with the appropriate line the the systems.txt file, so that quicklisp can load RDNZL.

The package provides two functions for making WMI queries. WMI-QUERY makes a query possibly on a remote machine with login credentials if required. LOCAL-WMI-QUERY makes a query on the local machine using current user privileges. These two functions are typically used to do get information, e.g.

(wmi-query "Select * From MSiSCSIInitiator_TargetClass" :host "ahost1" :namespace "root\wmi" :username "administrator" :password "password")

This returns a ManagementObjectCollection RDNZL container. Getting useful information out of this container requires further .NET calls, and is implemented by various utility functions provided with CL-WMI.

• collection-list collection This converts a ManagementObjectCollection into a list of the objects it contains.

• object-properties This returns an assoc list of the properties the object contains, with property names as keywords.

• collection-properties This maps over the objects in the collection, getting the object properties using the above.

• foreach General purpose macro for iterating over .NET objects.

• mapcoll This is basically a MAPCAR but for collections

• get-type-name Often the objects found from the ManagementObjectCollections are returned as RDNZL containers with the type "System.Object". This function extracts the true type name of the object.

• cast-from-type-name This casts a RDNZL container using the true type name

• unbox-from-type-name This unboxes the RDNZL container using the true type name, and also handles unsigned integers which RDNZL doesn't support.

• unbox-object This unboxes each of the properties of the ManagementObject, recursively calling itself on properties that are either arrays or other ManagementObjects

• unbox-collection This just applies unbox-object to each object in the collection

You can access the registry using WMI queries. The functions registry-query, registry-values and registry-subkeys provide get-access to the registry via WMI.

Typically you will do something like:

(unbox-collection (wmi-query "Select * From MSFT_Disk" :host "remote-host" :namespace "root\microsoft\windows\storage" :username "administrator" :password "password"))

This will walk through the WMI class that gets returned and extract the properties, returning them as an assoc list.

If you want to call methods of the WMI class then there's two things you might be doing. Either invoking a method explicitly of a ManagementObject, which is done with invoke-method, or calling a method of a WMI class itself. This is done either simply with invoke-class-method, or alternatively can be done with invoke-method on a management-class object. These can be made using make-management-class, which offers the possibilitity of creating classes on remote machines.

Here we start up notepad, see it running, and then terminate it. All on a remote machine:

;; make a management class object (defparameter mgtcls (make-management-class "Win32_Process" :namespace "root\cimv2" :host "remotehost" :username "administrator" :password "password"))

;; invoke the create method to start an instance of notepad.exe (invoke-method mgtcls "Create" "notepad.exe")

;; query to get a list of notepad instances running (defparameter processes (collection-list (wmi-query "select * from Win32_Process where name = 'notepad.exe'" :namespace "root\cimv2" :host "remotehost" :username "administrator" :password "password")))

;; take a look at the info contained in them, e.g. the processs id (mapcar #'unbox-object processes)

;; terminate the first notepad instance, probably the one we want. (invoke-method (car processes) "Terminate" 0)