How to get a version number from an output - powershell

Question

R&D has asked us to deploy a new outlook plugin to all the systems in the company... however, there is a catch. If you have any other plugins that are outdated from our company it will break them.. As such we need to determine if an endpoint has the plugin installed and what version it is. If its installed and less than version "X" then we need to update it. Another issue is that not everyone uses the plugins so we cant just push it to everyone and call it a day.
As such we found a query that will call WMI and spit out the output which we then write to a file. Running
"wmic product where "Vendor like '%Microsoft%'" get Name, Version > C:\temp\test.txt"
gives us output:
Name Version
First Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook 1.1.9.0
Second Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook 2.0.2.0
Third Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook 1.2.5.0
etc.
What we want to do is to parse each one of those and write the version to a file so we can then see if we need to deploy the new plugin or not.
Ex:
First.txt contains 1.1.9.0
Second.txt contain 2.0.2.0
etc.
If for example Test.txt has no "First" in it don't make a file at all. We pretty much have to use batch file to do this but should be able to also do this with PowerShell (although that will take some tweaking as our deployment system isn't very powerful).
As such I was wondering if someone can point me in the right direction regarding how to do this on a Windows system.

Answer 1

Note: This answer answers the question as stated and may be of interest from a regex-matching perspective, but for a fundamentally better approach see rojo's comment on the question.
The following Powershell pipeline writes to individual files, named for the product (with extension .txt) and containing the version number, as requested:
Get-Content C:\temp\test.txt | Select-Object -Skip 1 | ForEach-Object `
{
if ($_ -match '^(.*[^ ]) +([^ ]+) *$') {
$fname = $matches[1] + '.txt'
$ver = $matches[2]
$ver > $fname
}
}
Note that the output files are written to the current directory.
Get-Content C:\temp\test.txt sends the contents of the file line by line through the pipeline.
Select-Object -Skip 1 skips the header line.
$_ -match '^(.*[^ ]) +([^ ]+) *$' matches the line at hand ($_) against a regular expression that uses capture groups ((...)) to capture the product name and the version number substrings, accessible through the elements of special match-info variable $matches.
$fname = $matches[1] + '.txt' appends .txt to the 1st capture group - the product name - and stores it in variable $fname.
$ver = $matches[2] saves the version number - the 2nd capture group - in variable $ver.
$ver > $fname simply writes the version number to the output file.
Note that PowerShell creates UTF-16 LE-encoded files when you use output redirection (>); to use a different encoding, use, e.g., $ver | Out-File -Encoding utf8.
If you want to call the entire PowerShell command from cmd.exe (a batch file), use the following:
powershell.exe -noprofile -command "Get-Content C:\temp\test.txt | Select-Object -Skip 1 | ForEach-Object { if ($_ -match '^(.*[^ ]) +([^ ]+) *$') { $fname = $matches[1] + '.txt'; $ver = $matches[2]; $ver > $fname } }"
To only use the 2nd whitespace-separated token of the plug-in name as the file name:
In both commands above, replace:
$fname = $matches[1] + '.txt'
with:
$fname = (-split $matches[1])[1] + '.txt'