Search for Updates

A basic update scan is triggered with:

wuinstall /search

This queries all available Microsoft updates for the current machine — Windows, Office, and more — mirroring what you'd see in the Windows Update UI. Results are printed to stdout. A search-only call is completely non-destructive: nothing is downloaded or modified, making it ideal for auditing available updates or validating scripts before deployment.

Filtering Results

In most real-world scenarios you won't want to install every available update. WuInstall offers flexible filtering options to narrow down the result set:

XML Output

Search results can be written to an XML file, which is particularly useful when integrating WuInstall into automated pipelines or custom scripts that need to parse and act on update metadata programmatically.