Get-Host

PowerShell Help
1

Determining the powershell version can be important. Often this is done by using the Get-Host cmdlet. I read somewhere that this command returns the version of the powershell host, not the version of powershell itself.

Question: The powershell and the powershell host usually have the same version. Is there any case when the versions differ from each other?

2

If you’re talking about the Console and ISE, the versions will probably always match the PowerShell version. Developers can write their own custom hosts, though, which would have their own version scheme.

3

In PowerShell 2.0 and above you can also use the $psversiontable variable which will give some additional interesting info such as wsman version and CLR version

$psversiontable will give the powershell version rather than the host version

4

Thank you!

So Get-Host will usually return the right value, but might be wrong in some Special cases.
$psversiontable will fail on Powershell V1 but I found a great Workaround:

# If the $PSVersionTable variable doesn't exist, then you are running V1. # If it does exist, then the version will be available as $PSVersionTable.PSVersion.

function Get-PSVersion {
if (test-path variable:psversiontable) {$psversiontable.psversion} else {[version]“1.0.0.0”}
}

Source: http://powershell.com/cs/media/p/2617.aspx

In the end I decided to avoid getting and processing the version info and inserted a “#Requires -version 3.0” statement instead.