This article explains how to check the installed version of PowerShell.

Question

How can we discover which version of PowerShell we are running on?

Quick Answer

We can use the $PSVersionTable system variable:

$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

This will return an object with the installed version build numbers:

Long Answer

We can use $PSVersionTable to discover the versions of different components of PowerShell:

For example:

• CLRVersion property shows the installed version of the CLR.
• PSCompatibleVersions shows us what script versions we can run on the current installed versions.

Notably, the PSVersion shows the installed version of PowerShell:

Knowing this, we can then use this property to make decisions based on the installed version:

if ($PSVersionTable.PSVersion.Major -ge 4)
{
    "This is a supported version"
}
else
{
    throw "Please upgrade PowerShell to run this script."
}

Easy, isn’t it?