How to download a file in powershell

Im not sure whether this is possible. You would somehow need to enumerate the content of the folder and then download it. That is normally forbidden by webservers.

Then you could parse the output and ask for specific files to be downloaded or all of them. But I dont see any straight-forward way. This works fine but I cannot step through this content. When I put this content through a foreach loop it dumps every line at once.

If I save it to a file then I can use System. File::ReadLines to steps through line by line but that only works if I download the file.

How can I accomplish this without downloading the file? You can't parse text files with Invoke-WebRequest. If the text file is unstructured you can parse it with regex. More information about using regex in PowerShell can be found here and here. I am trying to download files from a site, sadly they are be generated to include the Epoch Unix timestamp in the file name. Now as I am unable to replace the Epoch Unix timestamp portion of the file name with a wild card, I was wondering if there was a way to do the download based on the date modified field of the file?

Thanks for this. I plan to use this along with task scheduler to download a fresh file every week. However, the new file overwrites the older one.

Is there a way to preserve the older file as well? Ken - You should be able to relatively easily - however, you'd have to download it first, since you can't get the file properties until you download it. You could download it to a temp location, grab the LastWriteTime stamp and parse it to create your new name. Sumit - You have a similar situation. You'll also need to manage the old copies so you don't fill up your disk. Your email address will not be published.

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Reducing the weight of our footer. Related 1. Hot Network Questions. Question feed. Accept all cookies Customize settings. Refer to the demo below to see how the code above works. As you can see, the download starts, and you see the download progress.

The PowerShell prompt is not available during the download process. Suppose you want to start the download process as a background job. To do so, you only have to add the -Asynchronous switch at the end of the Start-BitsTransfer command.

Initially, the state of each job would show c onnecting. To check the download job status, use the Get-BitsTransfer cmdlet. PowerShell is based on. NET, and its nature makes it capable of leveraging the power of. NET itself.

If you want to know more about these two. HttpClient vs. To use the WebClient class, you need to initiate an object as a System. WebClient object. Then, using the DownloadFile method starts the download of the file from the source. Please copy the code below and run it in your PowerShell session to test. However, the PowerShell prompt will be locked until the download is complete. If the source requires authentication to allow the file download, you can use the code below.

Instead, use the System. HttpClient class. It appears that the WebClient class is obsolete, and the new class that Microsoft is endorsing is the HttpClient class.

The next section talks about using the HttpClient class in PowerShell to download files from the web. Like the WebClient class, you need to create first the System. Refer to the comments above each line to know what each line of code does. In situations where downloading a file requires authentication, you need to add the credential to the HttpClient object. To include a credential to the file download request, create a new System. HttpClientHandler object to store the credentials.

You can copy the code below and run it in PowerShell to test. Or you can also run it as a PowerShell script. In this example, the code is saved as download-file.

At the start, the directory only has the script file in it. Then, the script proceeds to download the file.