How to recursively delete an entire directory with PowerShell 2.0?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

I used:

rm -r folderToDelete

This works for me like a charm (I stole it from Ubuntu).

Solution 3:

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