PowerShell - Unzip files using Expand-Archive

by
Jeremy Canfield |
Updated: April 25 2023
| PowerShell articles
If you are using PowerShell major version 5 or higher, you can use Expand-Archive to unzip .zip files. The $PSVersionTable.PSVersion command can be used to display your PowerShell version.
C:\Users\JohnDoe> $PSVersionTable.PSVersion
Major Minor Build Revision
----- ----- ----- --------
5 1 20348 1366
In this example, The example.zip file will be unzipped into the C:\temp directory.
Expand-Archive C:\example.zip -DestinationPath C:\temp
Here is how you could get all of the .zip files in a directory that contain "foo" in the file name and to extract each file to the C:\temp directory.
$files = Get-ChildItem -file -path "C:\path\to\dir" | Where-Object name -like "*foo*.zip"
foreach ($file in $files) {
Write-Host Will extract $file.FullName to C:\temp
Expand-Archive $file.FullName -DestinationPath C:\temp
}
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