Hello! And a belated Happy New Year!

Occasionally there is a need to get a dll out of the GAC and onto the file system: sometimes its useful to load directly into PowerShell using Get-Type from a folder rather than loading.

And I needed to get a way of getting A LOT of dlls out of the GAC, so here is the command line to extract from the GAC using cmdline.

cd c:\windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL

xcopy . C:\Gac /s /y

These flags will copy all files and folders except for empty ones, and also overwrite without prompting.

The first time you run this it will ask you if the destination is a file or directory, so specify directory and it’ll copy all the dlls into this folder. This can take some time though.