Downloading files from the internet in PowerShell (with progress)
Ok, so the easiest way (that I know of) to download files in powershell from the internet is to use the .net WebClient. The simple way I started with was the two liner:
$client = New-Object "System.Net.WebClient"
$client.DownloadFile("http://somesite.com/largefile.zip","c:\temp\largefile.zip"
However I was working on a script that required some pretty large files to be downloaded, and using the DownloadFile method has no progress indicator. I figured some users might thing the program died. So I decided to create a method that still uses the webclient to download the files, however give a status of where it is in the download. Here is what I came up with, hopefully someone else will find it useful.
function downloadFile($url, $targetFile)
{
"Downloading $url"
$uri = New-Object "System.Uri" "$url"
$request = [System.Net.HttpWebRequest]::Create($uri)
$request.set_Timeout(15000) #15 second timeout
$response = $request.GetResponse()
$totalLength = [System.Math]::Floor($response.get_ContentLength()/1024)
$responseStream = $response.GetResponseStream()
$targetStream = New-Object -TypeName System.IO.FileStream -ArgumentList $targetFile, Create
$buffer = new-object byte[] 10KB
$count = $responseStream.Read($buffer,0,$buffer.length)
$downloadedBytes = $count
while ($count -gt 0)
{
[System.Console]::CursorLeft = 0
[System.Console]::Write("Downloaded {0}K of {1}K", [System.Math]::Floor($downloadedBytes/1024), $totalLength)
$targetStream.Write($buffer, 0, $count)
$count = $responseStream.Read($buffer,0,$buffer.length)
$downloadedBytes = $downloadedBytes + $count
}
"`nFinished Download"
$targetStream.Flush()
$targetStream.Close()
$targetStream.Dispose()
$responseStream.Dispose()
}
This would be used like
downloadFile "http://somesite/largefile.zip" "c:\temp\largefile.zip"
