How to recursively delete an entire directory with PowerShell 2 0

Question

What is the simplest way to forcefully delete a directory and all its subdirectories in PowerShell  I am using PowerShell V2 in Windows 7   I have learned from several sources that the most obvious command  Remove-Item  targetDir -Recurse -Force  does not work correctly  This includes a statement in the PowerShell V2 online help  found using Get-Help Remove-Item -Examples  that states         Because the Recurse parameter in this cmdlet is faulty  the command uses the Get-Childitem cmdlet to get the desired files  and it uses the pipeline operator to pass them to the Remove-Item cmdlet      I have seen various examples that use Get-ChildItem and pipe it to Remove-Item  but the examples usually remove some set of files based on a filter  not the entire directory   I am looking for the cleanest way to blow out an entire directory  files and child directories  without generating any user warning messages using the least amount of code  A one-liner would be nice if it is easy to understand

User · Answer

I took another approach inspired by  john-rees above - especially when his approach started to fail for me at some point   Basically recurse the subtree and sort files by their path-length - delete from longest to the shortest  Get-ChildItem  tfsLocalPath -Recurse     Find all children     Select-Object FullName   Name  PathLength  Expression      FullName Length        Calculate the length of their path     Sort-Object PathLength -Descending    sort by path length descending        Get-Item -LiteralPath    FullName          Remove-Item -Force   Regarding the -LiteralPath magic  here s another gotchya that may be hitting you  https   superuser com q 212808

User · Answer

If you re committed to powershell  you can use this  as explained in the accepted answer  rm -r -fo targetDir  But I ve found it to be faster to use Windows Command Prompt rmdir  s q targetDir  In addition to being faster  another advantage to using the command prompt option is that it starts deleting files immediately  powershell does some enumeration first   so if something breaks while it s running  you ve at least made some progress in deleting files

User · Answer

For some reason John Rees  answer sometimes did not work in my case  But it led me in the following direction  First I try to delete the directory recursively with the buggy -recurse option  Afterwards I descend into every subdir that s left and delete all files   function Remove-Tree  Path         Remove-Item  Path -force -Recurse -ErrorAction silentlycontinue      if  Test-Path   Path   -ErrorAction silentlycontinue                 folders   Get-ChildItem -Path  Path    Directory -Force         ForEach   folder in  folders                        Remove-Tree  folder FullName                     files   Get-ChildItem -Path  Path -File -Force          ForEach   file in  files                        Remove-Item  file FullName -force                    if  Test-Path   Path   -ErrorAction silentlycontinue                        Remove-Item  Path -force

User · Answer

To avoid the  The directory is not empty  errors of the accepted answer  simply use the good old DOS command as suggested before  The full PS syntax ready for copy-pasting is    amp  cmd exe  c rd  S  Q  folderToDelete

User · Answer

del  lt dir gt  -Recurse -Force   I prefer this  short  amp  sweet   OR  remove-item  lt dir gt  -Recurse -Force   If you have a huge directory then what I usually do is  while  dir   where name -match  lt dir gt    write-host deleting  sleep -s 3    Run this on another powershell terminal and it will stop when it is done

User · Answer

When deleting files recursively using a simple Remove-Item  folder  -Recurse I sometimes see an intermittent error    folder  cannot be removed because it is not empty   This answer attempts to prevent that error by individually deleting the files   function Get-Tree  Path  Include               Get-Item  Path -Include  Include -Force              Get-ChildItem  Path -Recurse -Include  Include -Force             sort pspath -Descending -unique     function Remove-Tree  Path  Include             Get-Tree  Path  Include   Remove-Item -force -recurse     Remove-Tree some dir   An important detail is the sorting of all the items with pspath -Descending so that the leaves are deleted before the roots   The sorting is done on the pspath parameter since that has more chance of working for providers other than the file system  The -Include parameter is just a convenience if you want to filter the items to delete   It s split into two functions since I find it useful to see what I m about to delete by running  Get-Tree some dir   select fullname

User · Answer

I used   rm -r folderToDelete   This works for me like a charm  I stole it from Ubuntu

User · Answer

To delete the complete contents including the folder structure use  get-childitem  dest -recurse   foreach       remove-item    fullname -recurse    The -recurse added to remove-item ensures interactive prompts are disabled

User · Answer

There seems to be issues where Remove-Item -Force -Recurse can intermittently fail on Windows because the underlying filesystem is asynchronous  This answer seems to address it  The user has also been actively involved with the Powershell team on GitHub

User · Answer

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force some dir   does indeed work as advertised here   rm -r -fo some dir   are shorthand aliases that work too   As far as I understood it  the -Recurse parameter just doesn t work correctly when you try deleting a filtered set of files recursively  For killing a single dir and everything below it seems to work fine

User · Answer

rm -r   folder -Force          worked for me

User · Answer

Try this example  If the directory does not exist  no error is raised  You may need PowerShell v3 0   remove-item -path  c  Test Temp Test Folder  -Force -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

User · Answer

Deleting an entire folder tree sometimes works and sometimes fails with  Directory not empty  errors   Subsequently attempting to check if the folder still exists can result in  Access Denied  or  Unauthorized Access  errors   I do not know why this happens  though some insight may be gained from this StackOverflow posting     I have been able to get around these issues by specifying the order in which items within the folder are deleted  and by adding delays   The following runs well for me     First remove any files in the folder tree Get-ChildItem -LiteralPath  FolderToDelete -Recurse -Force   Where-Object   -not     psiscontainer      Remove-Item    Force    Then remove any sub-folders  deepest ones first      The -Recurse switch may be needed despite the deepest items being deleted first  ForEach   Subfolder in Get-ChildItem -LiteralPath  FolderToDelete -Recurse -Force   Select-Object FullName    Name  Depth  Expression      FullName -split       Count     Sort-Object -Property   Expression  Depth  Descending  true     Remove-Item -LiteralPath  Subfolder FullName -Recurse -Force      Then remove the folder itself   The -Recurse switch is sometimes needed despite the previous statements  Remove-Item -LiteralPath  FolderToDelete -Recurse -Force    Finally  give Windows some time to finish deleting the folder  try not to hurl  Start-Sleep -Seconds 4   A Microsoft TechNet article Using Calculated Properties in PowerShell was helpful to me in getting a list of sub-folders sorted by depth   Similar reliability issues with RD  S  Q can be solved by running DEL  F  S  Q prior to RD  S  Q and running the RD a second time if necessary - ideally with a pause in between  i e  using ping as shown below    DEL  F  S  Q  C  Some Folder to Delete       gt  nul RD  S  Q  C  Some Folder to Delete   gt  nul if exist  C  Some Folder to Delete   ping -4 -n 4 127 0 0 1  gt  nul if exist  C  Some Folder to Delete   RD  S  Q  C  Some Folder to Delete   gt  nul

User · Answer

Another useful trick    If you find a lot of files with same or similar name convention  like mac file with dot prefix name    that famous file pulltion   you can easily remove them with one single line from the powershell like this   ls -r      rm   This line is going to remove all files with a dot in the begining of the name inside the current directory  and all files with same circumstances inside other folders inside this directory too  Be aware about it when using it   D

User · Answer

rm -r  lt folder name gt  c   gt rm -r  my photos

User · Answer

Use the old-school DOS command   rd  s  lt dir gt

User · Answer

users   get-childitem   ServerName c  users    select -ExpandProperty name  foreach   user in  users     remove-item -path    Servername c  Users  user AppData Local Microsoft Office365 PowerShell    -Force -Recurse Write-Warning   user Cleaned      Wrote the above to clean some logfiles without deleting the parent directory and this works perfectly

User · Answer

Really simple   remove-item -path  lt type in file or directory name gt   press Enter

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