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12

Is there a one-liner that will zip/unzip files (*.zip) in PowerShell?

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7 Answers

up vote 16 down vote accepted

DotNetZip will allow you to do this from PowerShell. It is not a one-liner, but the library will allow you to write the PowerShell script you need.

You can also use the COM interface, see Compress Files with Windows PowerShell then package a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget.

Googling "zip powershell" or "unzip powershell" might also turn up useful results.

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+1 Linked article has useful Tasks unlike the most upvoted answer – Ruben Bartelink Apr 10 '12 at 10:09
up vote 89 down vote

This is how you can do it purely from Powershell without any external tools. This unzips a file called test.zip onto the current working directory:

$shell_app=new-object -com shell.application
$filename = "test.zip"
$zip_file = $shell_app.namespace((Get-Location).Path + "\$filename")
$destination = $shell_app.namespace((Get-Location).Path)
$destination.Copyhere($zip_file.items())
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15  
use $destination.Copyhere($zip_file.items(), 0x10) for overwriting existing files. 0x4 hides the dialog box, and 0x14 combines these and overwrites and hides the dialog. – Peter Apr 19 '11 at 4:06
Ok but how do you unzip? – D3vtr0n Oct 18 '11 at 22:16
3  
The line $destination.Copyhere($zip_file.items()) does the actual unziping. – Jonathan Allen Oct 28 '11 at 22:02
You can parcel the above into a function, if you wanted: function unzip($filename) { if (!(test-path $filename)) { throw "$filename does not exist" } $shell = new-object -com shell.application $shell.namespace($pwd.path).copyhere($shell.namespace((join-path $pwd $filename)).items()) } – James Holwell Jan 29 at 11:19
This should be the accepted answer. – tugberk Apr 19 at 21:06
up vote 16 down vote

You may wish to check out The PowerShell Community Extensions (PSCX) which has cmdlets specifically for this.

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1  
+1 PSCX is a great set of add-on cmdlets - I just wish I could pick and choose more which ones I want and which I don't. It seems to be changing a whole lot in my Powershell instance.... – marc_s Jun 12 '09 at 7:48
I've come across this because I actually want to automate the PSCX installation if I can for some coworkers. Trying it now to see what sort of issues I run into – jcolebrand Apr 27 '11 at 15:02
up vote 10 down vote

Now in .NET Framework 4.5, there is a ZipFile class that you can use like this:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('System.IO.Compression.FileSystem')
[System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::ExtractToDirectory($sourceFile, $targetFolder)
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Seems to be in 4.0 as well - at least, I don't have 4.5 installed and this still worked. – GalacticCowboy Feb 13 at 1:07
@GalacticCowboy: hmm, not what msdn says about this class… Glad it helped, and thank you for sharing, but please check again :] – mousio Feb 13 at 1:11
It definitely worked - I used it to extract over 400 zip files. I'll check to make sure I don't have 4.5 on here, but it doesn't show up under Microsoft.NET. – GalacticCowboy Feb 13 at 1:13
2  
Ok, withdrawn. :) Apparently 4.5 just takes over 4.0 instead of a separate install like 3.5 was. You have to look in the registry to find out, but it actually is 4.5... – GalacticCowboy Feb 13 at 1:18
This would be great if there were a simple method to ExtractToDirectory and an option to overwrite all existing files. – James Dunne Apr 2 at 0:43
up vote 2 down vote

I find the simplest solution to just use infozip binaries which I have used for years and use in a UNIX environment.

PS> zip -9r ../test.zip * 
PS> cd .. 
PS> unzip -t test.zip Archive:  test.zip
    testing: LinqRepository/          OK
    testing: LinqRepository/ApplicationService.cs   OK
    testing: LinqRepository/bin/      OK 
... 
No errors detected in compressed data of test.zip.

It would be straighforward to put a powershell wrapper around the text output but in practice I never need that so I haven't bothered.

http://www.info-zip.org/

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up vote 2 down vote

I also like Info-ZIP (the Zip engine found in most other Zip utilities) and 7-Zip, another favorite which has both a GUI and command line Zip utility. The point being, there are some good command-line utilities that will work for most PowerShell tasks.

There are some tricks to running command line utilities that were not built with PowerShell in mind:

  • Running an executable that starts with a number in the name, preface it with an Ampersand (&).

    &7zip.exe

  • Wrap each token, the utility is expecting to see from the command line, in quotes.

    &"c:\path with space\SomeCommand.exe" "/parameter2" "/parameter2" "parameter2's Value" "Value2 `" with a quote"

Try this:

zip filename.zip (Get-ChildItem somepath\*)

Or even:

zip filename.zip (Get-Content ListOfFiles.txt)
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up vote 0 down vote

WinRAR can work in CMD mode accepting arguments

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