Extract and Inspect All SharePoint Solutions with PowerShell

Migration or upgrades of SharePoint content databases commonly involve provisioning of WSP solutions. At times you may find yourself in need to search for a particular feature GUID, which is burried somewhere inside of one of the dozens solution files that you have extracted from a farm in question.

If you are on Windows Server 2012 or higher, you can leverage expand.exe command to extract CAB files (WSP files are CAB files).  Here is an one-liner PowerShell command to extract contents of your WSP solutions to respective folders:

dir *.wsp | % { New-Item -Type directory -Path ".\$($_.Name.Remove($_.Name.Length - 4))"; expand.exe $_.Name -F:* $_.Name.Remove($_.Name.Length - 4)}

How to use: First place your solutions to a folder, CD to it, then run the above command, which will create a folder per solution extracted and dump its contents in there.

Now you can quickly tell whether the feature Id you are after is among the ones extracted. For example, the following one-liner command will list all feature Ids, Titles as well as paths to Feature.xml files in a table format:

dir Feature.xml -Recurse | % { $path=[system.io.path]::combine($_.Directory, $_.Name); [xml]$doc = Get-Content -Path $path; $obj = New-Object PSObject -Property @{Path=$path; Id=$doc.Feature.Id; Title=$doc.Feature.Title;}; $obj} | select Id, Title, Path

Oh, and almost forgot that this may also be handy: you can use this line to dump all farm solution files to your current directory, once you make sure you are running it inside of elevated SP PowerShell session:

(Get-SPFarm).Solutions | ForEach-Object{$var = (Get-Location).Path + "\" + $_.Name; $_.SolutionFile.SaveAs($var)}

Happy migrating!