compress-archive and preserve relative paths

Question

I\'m having a challenging time getting compress-archive to do what I want...

I have a root project folder and I want to zip up some of the files in sub

Answer 1

It appears that Compress-Archive (as of Windows PowerShell v5.1) doesn't support what you want:

Targeting a folder recursively adds that folder's subtree to the archive, but only by the target folder's name (which becomes a child folder inside the archive), not its path.

Specifically,

Compress-Archive -Path scripts\module2 -DestinationPath tmp.zip

will (recursively) store the contents of scripts\module2 in tmp.zip, but not with archive-internal path .\scripts\module2, just with .\module2 - the target folder's name (the last input path component).

The implication is that you'd have to pass folder scripts instead to get the desired archive-internal path, but that would invariably include the entire subtree of scripts, given that Compress-Archive offers no inclusion/exclusion mechanism.

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One - cumbersome - option is to recreate the desired hierarchy in, say, the $env:TEMP folder, copy the target folder there, run Compress-Archive against the root of the recreated hierarchy, and then clean up:

New-Item -Force -ItemType Directory $env:TEMP/scripts
Copy-Item -Recurse -Force scripts/module2 $env:TEMP/scripts
Compress-Archive -LiteralPath $env:TEMP/scripts -DestinationPath tmp.zip
Remove-Item $env:TEMP/Scripts -Recurse -Whatif

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Otherwise, you may be able to find a solution:

• by using the .NET v4.5+ [System.IO.Compression.ZipFile] class directly; you can load it into your session with Add-Type -Assembly System.IO.Compression.FileSystem (not necessary in PowerShell Core).

• by using external programs such as 7-Zip,