Possible to specify PowerShell CLR Version as an argument

Question

Is it possible to run powershell passing it the version of the .NET CLR we require?

Systems using Powershell V2 use CLR version 2 by default, and we need version 4.

We could implement a configuration file to:

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShell.exe.config
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShellISE.Exe.config
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShell.exe.config
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShellISE.exe.config

Like this:

<configuration> 
<startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> 
    <supportedRuntime version="v4.0.30319"/> 
    <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727"/> 
</startup> 
</configuration>

But we don't want make changes on customers servers which may potentially break other programs which rely on PowerShell.

[This question](http://stackoverflow.com/a/5403227/517852) has some interesting answers, in particular [this one](http://stackoverflow.com/a/5403227/517852) about using activation configuration files for one-off invocations using .NET 4. — Mike Zboray, May 14 '15 at 18:22

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 13 '15 at 11:56

You could check the CLR Version in your script and exit with an error if the minimum requirements are not met:

if ($PSVersionTable.CLRVersion.Major -lt 4) {
  Write-Error 'CLR Version 4.0 or newer required.'
  exit 1
}

Alternatively, if checking for a minimum PowerShell version would also work, you could put a #requires directive as the first line in your script:

#requires -version 4.0

Possible to specify PowerShell CLR Version as an argument

1 Answers1