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

Solution 1:

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!

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

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