Open or extract files nupkg with Powershell

You can use Expand-Archive (you have to rename the file, see Can I use PowerShell `Expand-Archive` upon a zip file with no extension)

Rename-Item "Newtonsoft.Json.12.0.1.nupkg" "Newtonsoft.Json.12.0.1.nupkg.zip" Expand-Archive "Newtonsoft.Json.12.0.1.nupkg.zip" 

I prefer to use nuget cli, because it also intstalls dependencies. All you need is nuget install yourpackage . It's really just a 5MB executable, you can even download it each time you need to get the package:

$nugetUrl = "https://dist.nuget.org/win-x86-commandline/latest/nuget.exe" Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $nugetUrl -OutFile ".\nuget.exe" .\nuget.exe install yourpackage 

I would not recommend direct use of Expand-Archive. As mentioned by guys at Squirrel and as you can see in NuGet sources file names in archive are escaped using URI escaping.

If you decide to expand raw archive you should afterwards rename all files and directories containing % in their names using Uri.UnescapeDataString.

If you want more optimised approach in terms of file system writes here's the implementation:

function Expand-NugetArchive { [CmdletBinding()] param ( # File name of the Package [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)] [string] $FileName, # Directory [string] $ExtractDirectory, [boolean] $Overwrite = $false ) # Reference to the knowledge here https://stackoverflow.com/a/72590215/3299257 $extractPath = [System.IO.Path]::GetFullPath($ExtractDirectory); # Ensures that the last character on the extraction path # is the directory separator char. # Without this, a malicious zip file could try to traverse outside of the expected # extraction path. if ( -not $extractPath.EndsWith([System.IO.Path]::DirectorySeparatorChar.ToString(), [StringComparison]::Ordinal)) { $extractPath += [System.IO.Path]::DirectorySeparatorChar; } $archive = [System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::OpenRead($FileName) try { foreach ($entry in $archive.Entries) { $fullName = $entry.FullName if ($fullName.Contains('%')) { $fullName = [Uri]::UnescapeDataString($fullName) } # Gets the full path to ensure that relative segments are removed. $destinationPath = [System.IO.Path]::GetFullPath([System.IO.Path]::Combine($extractPath, $fullName)) [System.IO.Directory]::CreateDirectory([System.IO.Path]::GetDirectoryName($destinationPath)) | Out-Null # Ordinal match is safest, case-sensitive volumes can be mounted within volumes that # are case-insensitive. if ($destinationPath.StartsWith($extractPath, [StringComparison]::Ordinal)) { [System.IO.Compression.ZipFileExtensions]::ExtractToFile($entry, $destinationPath, $Overwrite) } } } catch { if ($null -ne $archive) { $archive.Dispose() } throw } }