It all began because I have a folder of Sysinternals tools and I thought now would be a good time to update it with the latest version.
But downloading a zip file and expanding to the folder is so old-fashioned surely? ;-) Why not use PowerShell to make it a one-click process.
Thus was born Download-File.ps1 which downloads a given link to a file and optionally passes it through down the pipeline. It’s a simple script, just a wrapper around the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet. Then was born Expand-Zip.ps1 which takes a zip file – either as a file, or a stream of bytes down the pipeline (from Download-File.ps1 for instance) – and expands this into a folder (over-writing the contents by default, but can optionally not over-write).
Neither of these are a big deal but it’s been so long since I did some PowerShell coding that I felt I must mention them. Maybe it’s of use to someone else too!
Now I can do something like the following (put it in a script of its own of course) and it will download the latest version of Sysinternals and expand to the specified folder.
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\path\to\Download-File.ps1 http://download.sysinternals.com/files/SysinternalsSuite.zip -PassThru | \path\to\Expand-Zip.ps1 -ExpandTo \absolute\path\to\Sysinternals |
I added some progress bars too to show what’s happening. Both scripts can be found in my GitHub repo: Download-File.ps1 and Expand-Zip.ps1.