Unblock multiple files using SysInternals Streams

Sometimes you may find that you need to unblock a file in wondows if you have downloaded it from the internet from moved it from a network drive – in this case you may encounter a message like this:

“This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer”

To do this you right click on the file in explorer, choose ‘properties’ and on the general tab click the ‘Unblock’ button.

This is all very well but what if you need to unblock a folder of 27 files, the above method would take an age?!

Well SysInternals have a utility called Streams which helps with this. Download Streams and extract streams.exe into a directory that’s on your path. Now, to unblock a folder full of files, open a command window and run something like this:


streams -s -d {directory}


This should unblock all the files in the specified directory!