Running Compress-Archive with Read-Host

Question

I will be running the script from the machine where I'd like the compressed file to be placed, in the path specified. I want to compress the folder from the UNC path (from the first Read-Host), and place a copy of the resulting .zip file into the specified directory on the computer (from the second Read-Host).

I would like some help adding the necessary components to this bit of Powershell code (assuming what I have here works).

I know that I could just run something like:

Compress-Archive \\tommc-pc\c$\users\tommc -DestinationPath c:\windows\temp\tommc_windows_home.zip

But I'd like to make it more user friendly, so the user would enter the UNC path for the source path and folder that's to be compressed, as well as a prompt for the full Destination path and filename of the .zip file on the machine I'm running the script from.

Might you be so kind as to provide some guidance on how I could accomplish this?

Answer 1

Compress-Archive doesn't support operations on a remote computer. To do the same thing remotely, you should be using Invoke-Command or PS-Session. Here is a sample with which you can do it:

Read-host -assecurestring | convertfrom-securestring | out-file C:\path\to\the\file\Credentials_encrypted.txt
$user = "domain\username"
$pass = Get-ChildItem "C:\path\to\the\file\Credentials_encrypted.txt" | ConvertTo-SecureString
$creds = new-object -typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist $user, $pass

## Below command will execute the command in the remote system. Means that Compress-Archive is now running locally on the remote machine. 
Invoke-Command -ComputerName Remote_Computer_IP -ScriptBlock { Compress-Archive -Path C:\Reference\* -DestinationPath C:\Destination\Destination_file.zip } -credential $cred

## Once the compression is done, you can simply use `copy-item` to pull the same file into your local system. 
Copy-Item -Path \\Remote_Computer_IP\C$\Destination\Destination_file.zip -Destination C:\localsystem\path\destination_file.zip

Apart from all these, keep in mind to Invoke a command on remote computer, you need to enable PSRemoting. So, go through my answer at the last of the question :ENABLE-PSRemoting to see the details.

Note: You can also pass the path of the source and the destination in in the remote computer from outside if you use @param inside the script block and pass the variables as -argumentlist in the Invoke-command