Windows Tip Sheet

How To Make Windows Spill the Beans

You have ways to make Windows talk, and Filever.exe is the truth serum.

• By Jeffery Hicks
• 01/09/2008

Often, I'll be looking at .exe files and sometimes a .dll or two and wonder, "Where did you come from and what do you do?"

The tool that makes the files talk is Filever.exe. This handy command-line tool prints out file version information. Open a command prompt and type Filever /? to see the usage syntax.

You can use Filever.exe to examine a single file or process all files in a folder or subfolders. The tool doesn't have a logging feature, so you'll need to redirect output if you want to save it.

If you use the default output, your results file can be imported into Excel as a space-delimited file, which makes it very easy to filter and sort. Want to build an Excel database of every .exe file on your C: drive? Type this:

C:\>filever /S /E c:\ > EXELog.txt

It takes a bit of time to run, but you should be able to open the file in Excel. Add a header line and you'll have a ton of information.

If you have a file you are particularly interested in, you can use the /V switch to get detailed information, including things like company name, product name and product version. The format, unfortunately, doesn't lend itself to saving to a file you could import into Excel. But you might be able to do something like this to get close (this is a single command):

C:\Windows\System32>for /f %f in ('dir *.exe /b') do @echo %f >> c:\sys32exe.txt && filever %f /v | find /i "description" >> c:\sys32exe.txt

Windows can be pretty talkative, if you know how to ask the right questions.