Have some files and need to create a zip archive using Powershell? No problem, it’s built in!

Since PowerShell version 5+, there is an Compress-Archive command built in:

Compress-Archive -Path file.txt, file2.txt -CompressionLevel Fastest -DestinationPath C:\compress\to\here\myzipfile.zip

Note: There’s a 2 GB max file size limit due to a limitation of the underlying API.

Not sure which version of PowerShell you have?

$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

Use Splatting

As seen in the example these lines can get long! Splatting can help with that. Here’s an example:

$compress = @{
  Path = "C:\Documents\file.txt", "C:\Documents\file1.txt"
  CompressionLevel = "Fastest"
  DestinationPath = "C:\Documents\myzipfile.zip"
}
Compress-Archive @compress

Find more information:

man Compress-Archive

Need to Extract a zip file?

Check out Expand-Archive in PowerShell