Windows 7 – Recursively Unzip Files and Delete Archives

Modifying the answer found here, this piece of PowerShell script should do what you want. Just save it as a file with the Extension ".ps1". When calling it, just call it as ./filename.ps1 and it will extract the files to separate folders, delete the zip files and remove all files with .pdf extension. I have not tested if it works properly with recursive paths, but it should, please test it.

Edit: If you don't want your zip files to be deleted, remove or comment out (#) the line rmdir -Path $_.FullName -Force

Requirements: PowerShell, 7-zip and for you to set the 7-zip path in the file.

param([string]$folderPath="D:\Blah\files")

Get-ChildItem $folderPath -recurse | %{ 

    if($_.Name -match "^*.`.zip$")
    {
        $parent="$(Split-Path $_.FullName -Parent)";    
        write-host "Extracting $($_.FullName) to $parent"

        $arguments=@("e", "`"$($_.FullName)`"", "-o`"$($parent)\$($_.BaseName)`"");
        $ex = start-process -FilePath "`"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe`"" -ArgumentList $arguments -wait -PassThru;

        if( $ex.ExitCode -eq 0)
        {
            write-host "Extraction successful, deleting $($_.FullName)"
            rmdir -Path $_.FullName -Force
            $arguments1="$($parent)\$($_.BaseName)\*.pdf"
            rmdir -Recurse -Path $arguments1
        }
    }
}

Taking in consideration the time it would take to decompress the zip folders once copied to a flash drive, what would be faster? Copying the compressed folders to a usb flash drive then decompress them on the flash drive or just copying the uncompressed folders to the flash drive.

Probably the latter.

Remember that decompression and other such things are done by the computer's CPU. You can copy data into a drive (be it flash or HDD), and you can copy data out, but you cannot tell the drive itself to decompress it – or do anything else, really.

So your first plan would involve:

1. Copying 10 GB of data from disk to flash
2. Reading those 10 GB back from flash to RAM
3. Decompressing it
4. Writing 15 GB of the decompressed data from RAM to flash
5. Deleting the useless compressed files left after step 1

The second:

1. Reading 10 GB directly from internal disk to RAM
2. Decompressing it
3. Writing 15 GB of decompressed data to flash

Notice how the first plan involves twice as much reading&writing. But not only that: in reality, steps 2-3-4 wouldn't happen in order but in parallel – which makes the process faster when reading from one drive and writing to another, but much slower when the same drive is doing both reads and writes.