How to view a PE EXE/DLL file version information?

Question

In Windows there is a version information page in an executable/library file properties window. How to view that info in Ubuntu?

Answer 1

I'm working in a tool called pev to retrieve information about PE files on the command line.

It is installable with

sudo apt-get install pev

The file version can be fetched with

peres -v program.exe | awk '{print $3}'

Answer 2

From the gnome-exe-thumbnailer script, suggested by Scott Ritchie:

wrestool --extract --raw --type=version inputfile.exe

extracts the version information, printing some binary data mixed with UTF-16 text. The script converts it to readable text by piping it through:

tr '\0, ' '\t.\0' \
| sed 's/\t\t/_/g' \
| tr -c -d '[:print:]' \
| sed -r -n 's/.*Version[^0-9]*([0-9]+\.[0-9]+(\.[0-9][0-9]?)?).*/\1/p'

The overall command is then wrestool --extract --raw --type=version inputfile.exe | tr '\0, ' '\t.\0' | sed 's/\t\t/_/g' | tr -c -d '[:print:]' | sed -r -n 's/.*Version[^0-9]*([0-9]+\.[0-9]+(\.[0-9][0-9]?)?).*/\1/p'.

Answer 3

As an alternative to using tr and sed to parse the output from @mechanical-snail 's solution, here is a GNU strings and GNU grep version:

$ wrestool --extract --raw --type=version putty.exe | strings -el | grep Version -A 1
FileVersion
Release 0.65
ProductVersion
Release 0.65

UPDATE:

Another alternative is a recent version of exiftool by Phil Harvey (it is based on perl, easy to install with sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl, also available for Mac and Windows). It has lots of formatting options.

# Example with exiftool 10.47
$ exiftool -FileVersion -ProductVersion putty.exe
File Version                    : Release 0.67
Product Version                 : Release 0.67

Answer 4

If you install the gnome-exe-thumbnailer package, you can simply look at the version number in nautilus, caja ,nemo and thunar.

The code to do this manually is available in /usr/bin/gnome-exe-thumbnailer.sh

Answer 5

For the sake of completeness, here's something you can do if you can't install new applications, but you do have p7zip and Vim:

1. Extract the metadata with 7z x whatever.exe .rsrc/VERSION/1
2. Open the resulting .rsrc/VERSION/1 file in Vim
3. Type :e ++enc=utf16le at the Vim command line to request that the file's contents be reinterpreted as little-endian UTF-16.

Answer 6

The method mentioned in @ssokolow's answer does not work exactly for me.

However, the 7z's (version 16.02 or above) "list" option will list that information already.

So, I defined the following Bash function:

function lspe
{
  7z l "$1" | sed -n -e '/^Comment =/,/^$/ p' | sed 's/^Comment = //'
}

You can put this function in your .bash_aliases file and use like this:

lspe executable.exe

Answer 7

I just found out myself how to create a nice python dict with the information (I was looking around myself and wound up here for some reason) and would like to present my method here:
Github Gists - spookyahell/exe2version_info.py

'''Licensed under the MIT License :)'''

import pefile
import pprint
pe =  pefile.PE('example.exe')


string_version_info = {}

for fileinfo in pe.FileInfo[0]:
    if fileinfo.Key.decode() == 'StringFileInfo':
        for st in fileinfo.StringTable:
            for entry in st.entries.items():
                string_version_info[entry[0].decode()] = entry[1].decode()

pprint.pprint(string_version_info)

I am licensing it under the MIT License... may anybody who feels the need to create useful scripts or other things with it...

And see Github Gists - spookyahell/peinfo.py for an example implementation of this method in another script...