I want to delete all bin and obj folders to force all projects to rebuild everything

Question

I work with multiple projects  and I want to recursively delete all folders with the name  bin  or  obj  that way I am sure that all projects will rebuild everything  sometimes it s the only way to force Visual Studio to forget all about previous builds     Is there a quick way to accomplish this  with a  bat file for example  without having to write a  NET program

User · Answer

I use  bat file with this commad to do that   for  f   F in   dir  b  ad  s    findstr  iles  Bin    do RMDIR  s  q    F  for  f   F in   dir  b  ad  s    findstr  iles  Obj    do RMDIR  s  q    F

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Something like that should do it in a pretty elegant way  after clean target    lt Target Name  RemoveObjAndBin  AfterTargets  Clean  gt       lt RemoveDir Directories    BaseIntermediateOutputPath     gt       lt RemoveDir Directories    TargetDir     gt   lt  Target gt

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Considering the PS1 file is present in the currentFolder  the folder within which you need to delete bin and obj folders    currentPath    MyInvocation MyCommand Path  currentFolder   Split-Path  currentPath  Get-ChildItem  currentFolder -include bin obj -Recurse   foreach        remove-item    fullname -Force -Recurse

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This depends on the shell you prefer to use   If you are using the cmd shell on Windows then the following should work   FOR  F  tokens      G IN   DIR  B  AD  S bin   DO RMDIR  S  Q    G  FOR  F  tokens      G IN   DIR  B  AD  S obj   DO RMDIR  S  Q    G    If you are using a bash or zsh type shell  such as git bash or babun on Windows or most Linux   OS X shells  then this is a much nicer  more succinct way to do what you want   find   -iname  bin    xargs rm -rf find   -iname  obj    xargs rm -rf   and this can be reduced to one line with an OR   find   -iname  bin  -o -iname  obj    xargs rm -rf   Note that if your directories of filenames contain spaces or quotes  find will send those entries as-is  which xargs may split into multiple entries  If your shell supports them  -print0 and -0 will work around this short-coming  so the above examples become   find   -iname  bin  -print0   xargs -0 rm -rf find   -iname  obj  -print0   xargs -0 rm -rf   and   find   -iname  bin  -o -iname  obj  -print0   xargs -0 rm -rf   If you are using Powershell then you can use this   Get-ChildItem    -include bin obj -Recurse   foreach        remove-item    fullname -Force -Recurse     as seen in Robert H s answer below - just make sure you give him credit for the powershell answer rather than me if you choose to up-vote anything     It would of course be wise to run whatever command you choose somewhere safe first to test it

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This is my batch file that I use for deleting all BIN and OBJ folders recursively     Create an empty file and name it DeleteBinObjFolders bat Copy-paste code the below code into the DeleteBinObjFolders bat Move the DeleteBinObjFolders bat file in the same folder with your solution    sln  file     echo off  echo Deleting all BIN and OBJ folders    for  d  r     d in  bin obj  do  if exist    d  rd  s q    d   echo BIN and OBJ folders successfully deleted    Close the window  pause  gt  nul

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To delete bin and obj before build add to project file    lt Target Name  BeforeBuild  gt       lt  -- Remove obj folder -- gt       lt RemoveDir Directories    BaseIntermediateOutputPath     gt       lt  -- Remove bin folder -- gt       lt RemoveDir Directories    BaseOutputPath     gt   lt  Target gt    Here is article  How to remove bin and or obj folder before the build or deploy

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You could actually take the PS suggestion a little further and create a vbs file in the project directory like this   Option Explicit Dim oShell  appCmd Set oShell    CreateObject  WScript Shell   appCmd         powershell -noexit Get-ChildItem    -include bin obj -Recurse   foreach        remove-item    fullname -Force -Recurse -WhatIf    oShell Run appCmd  4  false   For safety  I have included -WhatIf parameter  so remove it if you are satisfied with the list on the first run

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I think you can right click to your solution project and click  Clean  button   As far as I remember it was working like that  I don t have my VS NET with me now so can t test it

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I use to always add a new target on my solutions for achieving this    lt Target Name  clean folders  gt     lt RemoveDir Directories    ProjectName bin    gt     lt RemoveDir Directories    ProjectName obj    gt     lt RemoveDir Directories    ProjectVarName  bin    gt     lt RemoveDir Directories    ProjectVarName  obj    gt   lt  Target gt    And you can call it from command line  msbuild  t clean folders   This can be your batch file   msbuild  t clean folders PAUSE

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Is  clean  not good enough   Note that you can call msbuild with  t clean from the command-line

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We have a large  SLN files with many project files     I started the policy of having a  ViewLocal  directory where all non-sourcecontrolled files are located    Inside that directory is an  Inter  and an  Out  directory   For the intermediate files  and the output files  respectively   This obviously makes it easy to just go to your  viewlocal  directory and do a simple delete  to get rid of everything   Before you spent time figuring out a way to work around this with scripts  you might think about setting up something similar   I won t lie though  maintaining such a setup in a large organization has proved    interesting    Especially when you use technologies such as QT that like to process files and create non-sourcecontrolled source files   But that is a whole OTHER story

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A very quick and painless way is to use the rimraf npm utility  install it globally first    gt  npm i rimraf -g   And then the command from your project root is quite simple  which can be saved to a script file    projectRoot gt  rimraf    bin    obj   To optimize the desired effect you can leverage the project event targets  the one you could use is BeforeRebuild and make it run the previous command  which are specified in the docs  https   docs microsoft com en-us visualstudio msbuild how-to-extend-the-visual-studio-build-process view vs-2017  I like the rimraf utility as it is crossplat and really quick  But  you can also use the RemoveDir command in the  csproj if you decide to go with the target event option  The RemoveDir approach was well explained in another answer here by  Shaman  https   stackoverflow com a 22306653 1534753

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I actually hate obj files littering the source trees  I usually setup projects so that they output obj files outside source tree  For C  projects I usually use    lt IntermediateOutputPath gt       obj   AssemblyName    Configuration   lt  IntermediateOutputPath gt    For C   projects    IntermediateDirectory        obj   ProjectName    ConfigurationName

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Nothing worked for me  I needed to delete all files in bin and obj folders for debug and release  My solution   1 Right click project  unload  right click again edit  go to bottom  2 Insert   lt Target Name  DeleteBinObjFolders  BeforeTargets  Clean  gt     lt RemoveDir Directories        Publish    gt     lt RemoveDir Directories    bin    gt     lt RemoveDir Directories    BaseIntermediateOutputPath     gt   lt  Target gt    3  Save  reload project  right click clean and presto

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This Works Fine For Me  start for  d  r     d in  bin obj  ClientBin Generated Code  do  if exist    d  rd  s  q    d

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I use a slight modification of Robert H which skips errors and prints the delete files  I usally also clear the  vs   resharper and package folders   Get-ChildItem -include bin obj packages   ReSharper Caches    vs  -Force -Recurse   foreach        remove-item    fullname -Force -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Verbose    Also worth to note is the git command which clears all changes inclusive ignored files and directories   git clean -dfx

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I wrote a powershell script to do it    The advantage is that it prints out a summary of deleted folders  and ignored ones if you specified any subfolder hierarchy to be ignored

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http   vsclean codeplex com      Command line tool that finds Visual   Studio solutions and runs the Clean   command on them  This lets you clean   up the  bin   directories of all those   old projects you have lying around on   your harddrive

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This worked for me   for  d  r     d in  bin obj  do  if exist    d  rd  s q    d    Based on this answer on superuser com

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I found this thread and got bingo   A little more searching turned up this power shell script   Get-ChildItem    -include bin obj -Recurse   ForEach-Object        Remove-Item    FullName -Force -Recurse     I thought I d share  considering that I did not find the answer when I was looking here

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Here is the answer I gave to a similar question  Simple  easy  works pretty good and does not require anything else than what you already have with Visual Studio   As others have responded already Clean will remove all artifacts that are generated by the build  But it will leave behind everything else   If you have some customizations in your MSBuild project this could spell trouble and leave behind stuff you would think it should have deleted   You can circumvent this problem with a simple change to your   proj by adding this somewhere near the end     lt Target Name  SpicNSpan          AfterTargets  Clean  gt       lt RemoveDir Directories    OUTDIR    gt   lt  Target gt    Which will remove everything in your bin folder of the current platform configuration

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Very similar to Steve s PowerShell scripts  I just added TestResults and packages to it as it is needed for most of the projects   Get-ChildItem    -include bin obj packages TestResults -Recurse   foreach        remove-item    fullname -Force -Recurse

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from Using Windows PowerShell to remove obj  bin and ReSharper folders  very similar to Robert H answer with shorter syntax    run powershell cd change dir  to root of your project folder paste and run below script  dir    -include bin obj resharper  -recurse   foreach      rd    fullname    Recurse    Force

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On our build server  we explicitly delete the bin and obj directories  via nant scripts    Each project build script is responsible for it s output temp directories  Works nicely that way  So when we change a project and add a new one  we base the script off a working script  and you notice the delete stage and take care of it   If you doing it on you logic development machine  I d stick to clean via Visual Studio as others have mentioned

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For the solution in batch  I am using the following command        FOR  D  R   G in  obj bin  DO  IF EXIST   G IF    aG geq d RMDIR  S  Q    G        The reason not using DIR  S  AD  B xxx 1  DIR  S  AD  B obj will return empty list  at least on my Windows10   2  DIR  S  AD  B  obj will contain the result which is not expected  tobj folder

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Have a look at the CleanProject  it will delete bin folders  obj folders  TestResults folders and Resharper folders  The source code is also available

[visual-studio] I want to delete all bin and obj folders to force all projects to rebuild everything

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