Determine if the current PowerShell Process is 32-bit or 64-bit?

Question

When running a PowerShell script on an x64-bit OS platform, how can you determine in a script which version of PowerShell (32-bit or 64-bit) the script is running?

Background
Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of PowerShell are installed by default on a 64-bit platform, such as Windows Server 2008. This can lead to difficulties when running the PowerShell script, which must be oriented to a specific architecture (that is, using 64-bit for script for SharePoint 2010 to consume 64-bit libraries).

Related questions:

• What is the best way to program against powershell volatility x64 and x86? This question is about code that works with both 32-bit and 64-bit architecture. My question is about when you want to make sure that the script only works with the correct version.

Answer 1

If you are working with .NET 4.0 (PowerShell 3.0):

PS> [Environment]::Is64BitProcess True 

Answer 2

To determine in your script which version of PowerShell you are using, you can use the following helper functions (kindly provided by JaredPar the answer to the corresponding question):

 # Is this a Wow64 powershell host function Test-Wow64() { return (Test-Win32) -and (test-path env:\PROCESSOR_ARCHITEW6432) } # Is this a 64 bit process function Test-Win64() { return [IntPtr]::size -eq 8 } # Is this a 32 bit process function Test-Win32() { return [IntPtr]::size -eq 4 } 

The functions above use the fact that the size for System.IntPtr is platform specific. These are 4 bytes on a 32-bit machine and 8 bytes on a 64-bit machine.

Note that it is worth noting that the location of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Powershell is somewhat misleading. The 32-bit PowerShell is located in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe , and the 64-bit version of PowerShell is in C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe , courtesy of This article .

Answer 3

You can also use this. I tested it on PowerShell versions 2.0 and 4.0.

 $Arch = (Get-Process -Id $PID).StartInfo.EnvironmentVariables["PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE"]; if ($Arch -eq 'x86') { Write-Host -Object 'Running 32-bit PowerShell'; } elseif ($Arch -eq 'amd64') { Write-Host -Object 'Running 64-bit PowerShell'; } 

The value of $Arch will be either x86 or amd64 .

The nice thing about this is that you can also specify a process identifier other than local ( $PID ) to define the architecture of another PowerShell process.