How to determine what version of Windows you are running...

Now, this can be important if, for instance, you need to do some parsing functions ‘in script’ based on OS specific environment variables and/or formats. For instance – ‘%date%’ formats can differ as can ‘%%~t’ type extractions (but we’ll go into examples of that later).

Anyway – a good place to start is the ‘ver’ command – this will return a string that essentially contains the OS name and version number in three parts namely Major Version, Minor Version and Build Number in the format:

Microsoft Windows XX [Version X.X.XXXX]

Here is an overview of the most common:

Windows 1.0	1.04
Windows 2.0	2.11
Windows 3.0	3
Windows NT 3.1	3.10.528
Windows for Workgroups 3.11	3.11
Windows NT Workstation 3.5	3.5.807
Windows NT Workstation 3.51	3.51.1057
Windows 95	4.0.950
Windows NT Workstation 4.0	4.0.1381
Windows 98	4.1.1998
Windows 98 Second Edition	4.1.2222
Windows Me	4.90.3000
Windows 2000 Professional	5.0.2195
Windows XP	5.1.2600	Current SP3
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition	5.2.3790
Windows Vista	6.0.6000	6.0.6002 with SP2
Windows 7	6.1.7600

Happy days; we can just do the following then:

:search_ver
ver find "XP" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_xp_specific

ver find "2000" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_2000_specific

ver find "NT" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_nt_specific

ver find "98" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_98_specific

...etc...

goto win_unknown_specific

Now there is a trap here... you may have noticed that there are no Windows Server version numbers in that list – and this is the bitch – the ‘ver’ command will not return a full name for Windows OS’s from 2003 and above. And some of them share both major and minor versions with other Windows OS’s i.e. a ver command executed on a Windows Server 2003 machine might return the following:

Microsoft Windows [Version 5.5.3790]

Here is a list of Windows OS’s from 2003 and above with their Major and Minor version numbers:

Windows 7	6.1
Windows Server 2008 R2	6.1
Windows Server 2008	6.0
Windows Vista	6.0
Windows Server 2003 R2	5.2
Windows Server 2003	5.2
Windows XP 64Bit Edition	5.2
Windows XP	5.1
Windows 2000	5.0

Of course you could map out all the build numbers in your batch file... but this would be a dark task to research indeed – and ultimately pointless as it reveals more information that we would ever need with regards to batch scripting.

So – the only way to get correct version information in a batch script for Windows versions of 2003 and above is to do the following (and I apologise to whomever I nicked this from – but, alas, batch script programming is a ‘lost art’ and we must nick and patch together as we go); we have to use the sysinfo utility on systems of 2003 and above:

%SystemRoot%\system32\systeminfo.exe

Note: The sysinfo utility may not exist in earlier versions so you may also want to check it exists first:

if not exist %SystemRoot%\system32\systeminfo.exe goto :search_ver

This will either continue to the next bit (below) or redirect your script to the ‘ver’ command (as above). The next bit we have to do is extract the “OS Name” line from the output of the sysinfo utility... we do this by first dumping it to a temporary file:

systeminfo | find "OS Name" > %TEMP%\OSNAME.TMP

And then parsing the file with the ‘:’ delimiter to extract the exact text we want into the ‘osname’ variable:

FOR /F "usebackq delims=: tokens=2" %%i IN (%TEMP%\OSNAME.TMP) DO set osname=%%i

We can then scan this variable for our operating system by name i.e.:

echo %osname% find "Windows 7" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_7_specific

echo %osname% find "Windows Server 2008" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_2008_specific

echo %osname% find "Windows Vista" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_vista_specific

echo %osname% find "2003" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_2003_specific

...etc...

goto win_unknown_specific

Hope this helps!

@echo off

if not exist %SystemRoot%\system32\systeminfo.exe goto :search_ver

systeminfo | find "OS Name" > %TEMP%\OSNAME.TMP
FOR /F "usebackq delims=: tokens=2" %%i IN (%TEMP%\OSNAME.TMP) DO set osname=%%i

echo %osname% find "Windows 7" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_7_specific

echo %osname% find "Windows Server 2008" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_2008_specific

echo %osname% find "Windows Vista" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_vista_specific

echo %osname% find "2003" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_2003_specific

rem ...etc...

goto win_unknown_specific

:search_ver
ver find "XP" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_xp_specific

ver find "2000" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_2000_specific

ver find "NT" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_nt_specific

ver find "98" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto win_98_specific

rem ...etc...

goto win_unknown_specific

:win_7_specific
echo Windows 7
goto exit

:win_2008_specific
echo Windows Server 2008
goto exit

:win_vista_specific
echo Windows Vista
goto exit

:win_2003_specific
echo Windows Server 2003
goto exit

:win_xp_specific
echo Windows XP
goto exit

:win_2000_specific
echo Windows 2000
goto exit

:win_nt_specific
echo Windows NT
goto exit

:win_unknown_specific
echo Dunno.

:exit
pause