Delete Files and Folders Recursively Using Command Prompt
One of our readers recently asked a question with regards to deleting files and folders recursively using the command prompt.
I would like to delete all the folders and files in a folder. Like we have an option to delete all the files is "del *" but it will not work for deleting folders like "rmdir *"
The question is similar to a one asked to us earlier where a user wanted to know how to recursively delete certain file types from directories and sub directories using the command prompt.
However when it comes to deleting directories and subdirectories using the command prompt, the regular rmdirdoes not work with a wildcard.
In order to delete all files and folders recursively using the command prompt you will need to run the command;
rmdir /S directoryname
Replace directorynamewith the directory you want to delete.
Once you run the command you will be prompted whether you want to delete the files or not, if you do not want to see this prompt you can pass the /Q switch to the command, which will then run the command in non-verbose mode.
However you must note that files and folders deleted from the command prompt do not go to recycle bin, they are permanently deleted, so make sure that you really want to delete those files, however if you do delete those files accidentally you can use one of the free software to recover deleted files.
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Author: Keith Dsouza
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In linux, the command to do this is
rm -rf folder_namehow will i delete a folder in command prompt having some data in it(means folder is not empty.)
@gourab – The command mentioned above will delete all the sub-directories and files in a directory
Just use "rmdir /S directoryname" command
rmdir is NOT recursive……
I’m looking for a batch file solution which will delete all the CONTENTS of a folder (files and folders, recursively), but NOT the folder itself. I’ve been searching for hours but can’t find anything. The clunky solution would seem to be to delete the folder itself then recreate it with mkdir, but the folder is shared, and when I recreate it like this, it isn’t shared anymore. Any ideas?
This only deletes a folder in the current directory. The “/s” option includes the folder’s files, it does not recurse down the tree. I am hoping you’ll update this article to do the actually hard part of recursively removing ever folder under a root that matches the pattern.
Ok, ok, here ya go:
FOR /R %d IN (.svn) DO rmdir /s /q “%d”
Thank you WIlbur, i had a large project that wasn’t properly exported from SVN and your solution solved my problem