WinSCP - How to Zip, Download and Delete a file?

Question

How is it possible to Zip, Download and Delete (ZDD) a file in WinSCP?

For example, your local dir is Desktop and your remote dir (the one in your server machine) is, say, /var/www/html and you want to zip and download a particular dir or file, and then you want it to be removed the moment the download was finished.

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To further explain, in linux I could do, for example:

(
zip -r /var/www/html/dr.zip /var/www/html
scp /var/www/html/dr.zip USER@IP:/location
rm /var/www/html/dr.zip
)

I need similar thing for WinSCP yet I'm aware that the WinSCP download mechanism should be used and that it is different then the Nix scp utility.

My question:

Do you know a way to achieve this with WinSCP?

Answer 1

There's no way to ZIP files over any file transfer protocol (SFTP, FTP, SCP or WebDAV). That's why there's no such function in WinSCP, as it cannot be implemented reliably.

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Though, if you have a shell access to the server, you can use a shell command to ZIP the files. That's actually, what the Tar/GZip custom command does.

If you want it in one-go (zip-and-download), there's now a WinSCP extension that does exactly this:
Archive remote files to ZIP archive, download it, and optionally extract it.

Answer 2

Under custom commands, there is now an option to "Archive and Download" a file or directory. You could use that command and delete the file after the download.

If you are going to do this often and really want to auto-delete after download, you could modify the powershell script to delete the files after download. I will explain this for WinSCP version 5.17.6

Open this file in an editor: c:\Program Files (x86)\WinSCP\Extensions\ArchiveDownload.WinSCPextension.ps1

Line 151 which should contain:

$session.GetFiles($source, $target, $True).Check()

Add these lines after that line:

$commands = "rm -rf $filesArgs"
$result = $session.ExecuteCommand($commands)
$result.Check()