How to zip/unzip files in Powershell?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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())

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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/

Answer 5

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)

Answer 6

WinRAR can work in CMD mode accepting arguments