How To Get The PowerShell Edition

Yesterday’s post, “How To Get The PowerShell Version”, discussed how to get the PowerShell version that you are running under.

In this post, we will look at a simpler challenge - how to get the edition.

As a reminder, there are two editions of PowerShell:

1. PowerShell For Windows (version 5 and below)
2. PowerShell Core (Version 6 and above, 7 being the current)

One way would be to ride on what we learned yesterday.

We can use this invocation:

$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

From this, we can extract the property MajorVersion.

If it is 5, then that is PowerShell for Windows.

If it is larger than 5, then that is cross-platform PowerShell Core.

There is another, simpler way to obtain this information..

We can use the following invocation:

$PSVersionTable.PSEdition

If we run it under PowerShell for Windows, we get the following result:

It returns a string value, Desktop

We can also run it under PowerShell Core on Windows.

It returns a string value, Core

On macOS, which can run PowerShell Core, it returns the same:

TLDR

You can obtain the PowerShell edition from the $PSVersionTable.PSEdition invocation.

Happy hacking!