Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Zip Files with PowerShell

With PowerShell, you can access the very wide range of objects from the .NET class libraries. This means you can access directly the functionality provided by the methods in these various objects. Dave Donaldson posted his discovery of this in his article Running .NET Code from PowerShell Scripts. Old PowerShell hands (and readers of my script blog are familiar with this. I find it pretty cool that you can reach into .NET to use it’s features directly in your PowerShell scripts.

In addition, if you write a library of managed code, you can use the objects/methods in that add-on code. Donaldson discusses his use of the SharpZibLib library. This library is a Zip, Gzip, Tar, BZip2 library written in C#. This library is free (released under the GPL). One cool thing about this library is that you can use it to create commercial closed source apps. You can download the binaries (there’s one for .NET 1.1, .NET 2.0, as well as .NET CF 1.0 and .NET CF 2.0), the course code or a help file.

With this library, you can easily create and manipulate zip files. I’ve used this in a script I’ve developed that zips up the script files in my PowerShell Script library and uploads them to http://www.reskit.net/powershell/scriptlib.zip). I’ll publish the full script once I finish it off!

To show the use of this external library  here’s the basic bit of script I use to create the zip file:

# First, load the zip library [void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("C:\foo\bin\ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.dll") # Now create a new zip file object $zip = new-object ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip.FastZip # Define what to zip and from where $zipfile = "C:\Foo\PSScriptLib.Zip" $zipfrom = "E:\PowerShellScriptLib" $recurse = "true" $ziptoadd = ".ps1" # Now create the zip file $zip.CreateZip($zipfile, $zipfrom, $recurse, $ziptoadd) ls $zipfile

This script first loads the library using System.Reflection.Assembly. Once the assembly is loaded, we create a new object representing a zip file. The script then defines what to zip, and where we to put the zip file. Then we use the CreateZip method to add all the .PS1 files in E:\PowerShellScriptLib (and below) into the zip file that ends up in C:\Foo\PSScriptlib.Zip. The script finishes by performing a directory listing of the newly created zip file.

Running this bit of code produces something like this:

PS C:\foo> .\ZipScriptLib.ps1' Directory: Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::C:\foo Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a--- 11/30/2008 11:37 AM 51816 PSScriptLib.ZIP

Of course, that’s only the first step. I’ll need to use the SharpZipLib to add a “readme” file to the archive and I’ll need to upload the zip file to my web site. I’ll cover these aspects in a later blog post!

5 comments:

Cheeso said...

You can also do this easily with Ionic's ZIP library, aka DotNetZip.

It conveniently lets you add a text file from a string, with the AddFileFromString method.

Here's the actual PS script I use to zip up the source distribution of DotNetZip:

function ZipUp-Files ( $directory )
{

$children = get-childitem -path $directory
foreach ($o in $children)
{
if ($o.Name -ne "TestResults" -and
$o.Name -ne "obj" -and
$o.Name -ne "bin" -and
$o.Name -ne "tfs" -and
$o.Name -ne "notused" -and
$o.Name -ne "Release")
{
if ($o.PSIsContainer)
{
ZipUp-Files ( $o.FullName )
}
else
{
if ($o.Name -ne ".tfs-ignore" -and
!$o.Name.EndsWith(".cache") -and
!$o.Name.EndsWith(".zip") )
{
Write-output $o.FullName
$e= $zipfile.AddFile($o.FullName)
}
}
}
}
}


[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("c:\\\bin\\Ionic.Utils.Zip.dll");

$zipfile = new-object Ionic.Utils.Zip.ZipFile("zipsrc.zip");

ZipUp-Files "DotNetZip"

$zipfile.Save()

Unknown said...

What about the new extension with winzip? The .zipx,will this work on that or will adjustments need to bemade?

Thomas Lee said...

Re Joes's comment - I have no idea but I suspect this script may need adjustment. Ive not played wiht hte new version of Winzip to be sure.

Unknown said...

Hello there,
I often have to interact with the Zipx files and i found them corrupt most of the time, after reading some blogs i come to know that these files can be repaired rather than deleting them. You can even repair Zipx after crc error. There are some software which are intentionally built for the repairing process. You can download the trial version of the software and can repair your files.

Unknown said...

Hello there,
I often have to interact with the Zipx files and i found them corrupt most of the time, after reading some blogs i come to know that these files can be repaired rather than deleting them. You can even repair Zipx after crc error. There are some software which are intentionally built for the repairing process. You can download the trial version of the software and can repair your files.