reboost blog

Dec 17, 2015

Unziping Files With Powershell v5

One of the best new features in Windows 10 is the upgrade to Powershell 5. Along with a ton of useful new cmdlets (like Invoke-WebRequest), you can now expand zip files natively. The Archive Module actually includes both compression and expansion cmdlets, but I found the unzipping tool the be the most useful for quick one liners.

In its most basic form, simply call Expand-Archive and the path to the archive to expand to the current directory. However, things get interesting when you string commands together. For example, this will recursively unzip every archive in a directory tree to its current folder and delete the original archive:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Filter *.zip $path | \
%{ Expand-Archive -Path $_.FullName -DestinationPath $_.DirectoryName; Remove-Item $_.FullName }