How to Unzip Files with PowerShell (Expand-Archive)

Every Friday, the Portland, Seattle and Boise stores of Cascade Outdoor Supply email Tom Baker a zip of their weekly reports. To unzip a file in PowerShell, run Expand-Archive with the zip’s path and a destination folder:

Expand-Archive -Path .\Inbox\Store-Portland-2026-10-16.zip -DestinationPath .\Reports\Portland

In this tutorial, I’ll turn that one line into Tom’s weekly script and cover each PowerShell unzip file task he hit on the way: overwriting, peeking inside a zip, pulling out one file, and looping over a folder.

I ran each step in PowerShell 7.6 and Windows PowerShell 5.1, and they differ more than you’d expect.

What the finished unzip script does

Here’s the goal. Expand-StoreReports.ps1 finds every zip in the Inbox folder and unzips each one into a folder named after the store:

.\Expand-StoreReports.ps1

Output:

Store-Boise-2026-10-16.zip -> C:\psfaqs\Reports\Boise (3 files)
Store-Portland-2026-10-16.zip -> C:\psfaqs\Reports\Portland (3 files)
Store-Seattle-2026-10-16.zip -> C:\psfaqs\Reports\Seattle (3 files)

Windows PowerShell 5.1 printed the same three lines. The script finds the zips with the Get-ChildItem cmdlet and runs Expand-Archive once per file.

Step 1: Unzip a file with Expand-Archive

Expand-Archive ships with PowerShell 5.0 and later, so there’s nothing to install. Give it the zip in -Path and the folder to fill in -DestinationPath, then list what came out:

Expand-Archive -Path .\Inbox\Store-Portland-2026-10-16.zip -DestinationPath .\Reports\Portland
Get-ChildItem -Path .\Reports\Portland -Name

Output:

notes.txt
returns-2026-10-16.csv
sales-2026-10-16.csv

The Reports\Portland folder didn’t exist yet. Expand-Archive created it, so you don’t need to create the folder first.

Unzip to a folder named after the zip

Leave out -DestinationPath, and Expand-Archive creates a folder with the zip’s name in the current location:

Set-Location -Path C:\psfaqs
Expand-Archive -Path .\Inbox\Store-Portland-2026-10-16.zip
Get-ChildItem -Path .\Store-Portland-2026-10-16 -Name

Output:

notes.txt
returns-2026-10-16.csv
sales-2026-10-16.csv

If the zip name has square brackets, such as Draft[v1].zip, use -LiteralPath instead of -Path. Otherwise, PowerShell reads the brackets as a wildcard pattern.

Step 2: Overwrite existing files with -Force

The second Friday, Tom ran the same line again and got an error, because the files were already there:

try {
    Expand-Archive -Path .\Inbox\Store-Portland-2026-10-16.zip -DestinationPath .\Reports\Portland -ErrorAction Stop
}
catch {
    "Failed. $($_.Exception.Message)"
}

Output:

Failed. Failed to create file 'C:\psfaqs\Reports\Portland\sales-2026-10-16.csv' while expanding the archive file 'C:\psfaqs\Inbox\Store-Portland-2026-10-16.zip' contents as the file 'C:\psfaqs\Reports\Portland\sales-2026-10-16.csv' already exists. Use the -Force paramete