Generating a list of all the hotfixes and service packs on a Windows system

If you woul like to see a list of all the Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) updates, aka hotfixes, for a Microsoft Windows system from the command line, you can enter the command wmic qfe list. The command will work from systems from Windows XP Professional onwards. You can control the amount of information displayed for each hotfix by including a list format after the word "list", e.g., wmic qfe list brief. You can see the available formats with wmic qfe list /?. The following LIST formats are available:

Format	Includes
BRIEF	Description, FixComments, HotFixID, Install Date, InstalledBy, InstalledOn, Name, ServicePackInEffect, Status
FULL
INSTANCE	__PATH
STATUS	__PATH, Status
SYSTEM	__CLASS, __DERIVATION, __DYNASTY, __GENUS, __NAMESPACE, __PATH, __PROPERTY_COUNT, __RELPATH, __SERVER, __SUPERCLASS

You can direct the output to a file by specifying /output:filename before qfe list. E.g.:

The output in the above example would be in hotfixes.txt. If you wanted the output to go to the clipboard, instead, you could use wmic /output:clipboard qfe list brief.

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