PowerShell: Find User based on partial name

Some time ago, I needed to look up the account names of a handful of users in Active Directory. The information I had beforehand was their names. I did not have ADUC available to me, but I did have PowerShell. This is an excellent use case for the Get-ADUser cmdlet when combined with the -Filter parameter. Here’s what my first stab at the problem looked like this:

Get-ADUser - Filter displayName "Givenname Surname"

That, however, threw an error message:

I next added a comparison operator to my command, as follows:

Get-ADUser -Filter displayName -like "Firstname Surname"

This, too, threw an error message:

Once I added curly brackets to the command, however, did get the result I wanted – although not for all the users. Whenever it didn’t find a user, it didn’t return a result. On a hunch that it might be down to spelling inconsistencies, I removed everything but their surname, and added a wildcard, which finally netted me all the users’ account names. Here is my final query:

Get-ADUser -Filter {displayName -like "*Surname"}