Knowing the version of Powershell you are running is very important as some commands/syntax will only work on new versions and vice-versa.
To display the Powershell version, issue one of the following commands:
- Get-Host | Select Version
- $PSVersionTable
Versions of Powershell are as follows.
- V1 and V2 were released in 2006 for XP SP2, Vista and Windows Server 2003
- V3 was first released for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R1. No support for XP
- V4 was released for Windows 7.1 and Windows Server 2008 R2
- V5 was released as the Windows Management Framework (WMF)
- V5.1 was released for the Windows 10 Anniversary Update and Windows Server 2012 R2
- V6 is better known as Powershell core and was released in 2016. It is platform independent so there are installations for macOS and Linux