get file version of .dll in powershell from remote computers

Question

I am trying to get the file version of a dll remotely using Powershell on several servers and have write the server name, dll version, and dll file location to a csv or html report. The catch is some of the servers are Win 2003 and Win 2008. So the file may reside in for example C:\Program Files\WinZip\WZCAB.DLL or C:\Program Files (x86)\WinZip\WZCAB.DLL. The script would check one location and if it did not exist it would check the other and then write it out. Can anyone help me out?

Just a few things - This script will be used to access 200+ servers or VM's both 2003 and 2008. On 2003 it needs Powershell 2.0 and 2008 it will be timely to enable remoting. I was thinking maybe I need to utilize WMI. I have two other scripts that utilize WMI to get patches and reboot times. I did though try Ravikanth script (thank you again) and got the following error when passing a txt file of servers - One or more computer names is not valid. If you are trying to pass a Uri, use the -ConnectionUri parameter or pass Uri objects instead of strings. Again since I will not be enabling remoting on each server, is there another way of doing this? I modified Ravikanth script (below) and tried it locally, works greats. When I try it remotely, it does not. Any thoughts?

$servers = "D:\scripts\winzip\servers.txt" 
$x86Path = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\WinZip\WZCAB.DLL'
$x64Path = 'C:\Program Files\WinZip\WZCAB.DLL'

    foreach ($computername in $servers){
        if (Test-Path $x86Path) {
            (Get-Item $x86Path | Select -ExpandProperty VersionInfo).FileVersion
        } elseif (Test-Path $x64Path) {
            (Get-Item $x64Path | Select -ExpandProperty VersionInfo).FileVersion           
        }
    }

Solution

If you have remoting enabled on those computers:

$servers = 'server1','server2'
$x86Path = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\WinZip\WZCAB.DLL'
$x64Path = 'C:\Program Files\WinZip\WZCAB.DLL'
Invoke-Command $servers {
    Param ($x86Path, $x64Path)
    if (Test-Path $x86Path) {
        (Get-Item $x86Path | Select -ExpandProperty VersionInfo).FileVersion
    } elseif (Test-Path $x64Path) {
        (Get-Item $x64Path | Select -ExpandProperty VersionInfo).FileVersion           
    }
} -ArgumentList $x86Path,$x64Path

This is the WMI way of doing it:

$servers = @(Get-Content C:\servers.txt) 
$servers | % { Get-WMIObject -ComputerName $_ -Query "SELECT * FROM CIM_DataFile WHERE Drive ='C:' AND Path='\\Program Files (x86)\\WinZip\\' AND FileName='WZCAB' AND Extension='dll'" } | select Version

This is only part of what you need. You need to put a try-catch block to make sure you handle the errors in case the file is not found at that path. I will leave that for your R & D.

Comments

[user1086732]

thanks for the quick response..

[ravikanth]

You code doesn't really access any remote servers. It is actually not even iterting through the collection as you are reading the servers.txt content as an array. There is a WMI way of doing this using CIM_DataFile WMI Class.

[manojlds]

Avoid giving exact code when the OP has not shown what he / she has tried. This is not a place to just get whatever code someone wants, as you might know.

[Andy Arismendi]

Don't see why not in this case. This is pretty trivial

[ravikanth]

Why not? There is no harm in offering help to a beginner, IMHO.

[JasonMArcher]

@ravikanth you need to define the two path variables inside the scriptblock, otherwise they don't exist during the remote execution.

[ravikanth]

@Jason, you are right. I overlooked that as I did not execute this code before putting it here. have updated it to add param()