PowerShell script to query file versions on remote computers

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Venkat Sri

Venkat Sri is a senior Windows system engineer who specialises in PowerShell, Active Directory and virtualization. On 4sysops, he shares useful PowerShell scripts for system administrators.

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Querying the file version of a single file is easy. You can use the Get-Item cmdlet, as shown in the following example, to get the file version information. But things become difficult when you have to do this for hundreds of computers.

(Get-Item C:\Windows\system32\tcpipcfg.dll).VersionInfo

When you want to find the version of a particular file in all computers in your environment, you need a sophisticated script that handles several error conditions and generates neat output. The script provided in this article is developed to help in such scenarios.

This script (Get-FileVersionInfoRemotely.ps1) has the following features:

1. It takes one or more computer names as input.
2. It takes the local path of the file that you want to query. For example, if you want to query the file version of c:\program files\app1\appinfo.dll, you can provide the file path as is rather than specify an UNC path such as \\computername\c$\program files\app1\appinfo.dll.
3. It provides the status of each computer in the report. The value of this status column indicates the result of querying that computer. See the output screenshot at the end of this article to understand this better.
   • SUCCESS: Indicates that the script was able to query the file version on a remote computer.
   • FailedTOQuery: Indicates that script was unable to query the file version. Possible reasons include file permissions or trouble accessing the remote $ share of the drive where the file resides.
   • PathNotAccessable: Indicates that the script was unable to access the path. As a result, the file was not found in the location that was provided in the input.
   • NotReachable: Indicates that the computer you want to query did not respond to the ping.
4. It generates a CSV output that you can easily filter using Excel and use for further processing.
5. Along with the file version, the script gives the product version, original name of the file, product name, and file description.
6. You can pass the output file name to the -OutputFile

[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
	[string[]]$ComputerName = $env:ComputerName,
	[Parameter(mandatory=$true)]
	[string]$Path,
	[string]$OutputFile = "c:\temp\FileVersionInfo.csv"
)

$parts = $Path -split ":\\"
$DriveLetter = $parts[0]
$PathwoRoot = $parts[1]
Write-Verbose "Drive letter is $DriveLetter"
Write-Verbose "Remaining Path is $PathwoRoot"
try {
	$Parent = [System.IO.Directory]::GetParent($OutputFile)
	if(Test-Path $Parent.FullName) {
		Write-Verbose "Output folder $($parent.FullName) exists"
	} else {
		throw "Directory $($parent.FullName) not found. Output file cannot be created"
	}
} catch {
	Write-Error "Error occurred while checking output folder. $_"
	return
}
$OutputArr = @()
foreach($Computer in $ComputerName) {
	Write-Host "Querying file version on $Computer"
	$OutputObj = New-Object -TypeName PSobject  
	$OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name ComputerName -Value $Computer 
	$OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name FilePath -Value $Path
	$OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name FileVersion -Value $null
	$OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name ProductVersion -Value $null
	$OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name Status -Value $null
	$OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name OriginalName -Value $null
	$OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name FileDescription -Value $null
	$OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name ProductName -Value $null
	
	if(Test-Connection -ComputerName $Computer -count 1 -quiet) {
		$TargetPath = [string]::format("\\{0}\{1}`$\{2}",$Computer,$DriveLetter,$PathwoRoot)
		Write-verbose "Trying to get $TargetPath file version"
		if(Test-Path $TargetPath) {
			try {
				$VersionInfo = [System.Diagnostics.FileVersionInfo]::GetVersionInfo($TargetPath)
				$OutputObj.FileVersion = $VersionInfo.FileVersion
				$OutputObj.ProductVersion = $VersionInfo.ProductVersion
				$OutputObj.OriginalName = $VersionInfo.OriginalName
				$OutputObj.FileDescription = $VersionInfo.FileDescription
				$OutputObj.ProductName = $VersionInfo.ProductName
				$OutputObj.Status = "SUCCESS"
			} catch {
				$OutputObj.Status = "FailedTOQuery"
			}
		} else {
				$OutputObj.Status = "PathNotAccessable"
		}
	} else {
		$OutputObj.Status = "NotReachable"
	}
	$OutputArr += $OutputObj
	Write-Verbose $OutputObj
}

$OutputArr | Export-csv $OutputFile -NotypeInformation

Now that we have seen the script’s features, let’s look at some usage examples.

In the example below, we query the file version of a remote computer named PSDC02. The -OutputFile parameter is optional. If you don’t specify it, the script writes the output to c:\temp\fileversioninfo.csv by default.

PS C:\temp> .\Get-FileVersionInfoRemotely.ps1 -ComputerName PSDC02 -Path C:\Windows\system32\tcpipcfg.dll -OutputFile c:\temp\fileversiondetails.csv

You can use the above command to collect file version information from multiple computers as well. To do so, provide a list of computer names as comma-separated values to the -ComputerName parameter, as shown below:

PS C:\temp> .\Get-FileVersionInfoRemotely.ps1 -ComputerName PSDC02,PSDC01 -Path C:\Windows\system32\tcpipcfg.dll -OutputFile c:\temp\fileversiondetails.csv

For a large number of computers, place the computer names in a text file by entering one computer name per line. You can then pass the text file to the script, as shown below:

PS C:\temp> .\Get-FileVersionInfoRemotely.ps1 -ComputerName (get-content c:\temp\workstations.txt) -Path C:\Windows\system32\tcpipcfg.dll -OutputFile c:\temp\fileversiondetails.csv

You can place the text file anywhere, but make sure to provide the complete file path. No restriction exists with regard to the name of the text file.

The screenshots below show the script progress and the contents of the output file when the script runs against multiple computers.

I hope this script is helpful. If you have any problems using this script or suggestions for how to improve the script, please leave a comment.