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How to delete files in a folder and its subfolders via command line?

Deleting files is good and bad.

Good because it will free up space and able to get rid of your unwanted files.

Deletion is bad when you accidentally delete a file, and lost everything.

Confident that there was a backup and yes indeed there was a backup that was never tested.

Upon recovery backup is corrupted.

Well life is full of surprises; you got to be ready what mystery life may bring.

There are instances that we need to delete unwanted files.

Not only the file has been there since Windows 95 era, there are files that you keep and you even don’t even know why you’re keeping it.

You forgot what the purpose of the file is and why it was downloaded and besides the file has been dormant for years and years and it’s just taking up space on your hard drive.

When the time comes, you want to get rid of those files that you don’t need.

But there’s a hundred or thousands of it, and it’s not fun to delete them one by one.

If you’re a scripter first thing that will come into your mind, you will make a script and that’s it delete those files.

Script can do the job but I believe in simplicity, if there is a simple way to finish the job the simpler would be the better.

So a one liner command line can do the job to delete files in your folder and subfolders.

Here’s how to do it.

First, if you just want to have a list before deleting the files.

Type this at the command line:

For example you just want to have a copy of all zip files on directory c:\xrar and its subfolders.

Open command prompt.

     DIR c:\xrar\*.zip  /s  > d:\backup\myFileList.txt

Above command line will read the contents of xrar and its subfolders and the list will be written to myFileList.txt.

Before doing any deletion check myFileList.txt and check whether the command executed the way you want it to be.
 
myFileList.txt contains all zip files on that particular folder specified on the command.

NOTE: If myFileList.txt contains other files, which is not a zip file. Please don’t execute command below.

Since you have the list of files on the specified folder path, you are ready to delete.

Having the list of files before deletion will be helpful, if some other time you can’t find the file you just go back to your list and check whether the file has been deleted. Save your time for searching the file.

On this example we will just delete all the zip files on the xrar folder and its sub folders.

The command to do the jobs is:

Open command prompt.

Please be extra careful, when executing delete command and be sure that you don’t need the file and you know exactly what you are doing.

     DEL c:\xrar\*.zip /s /q

Below is an example when I executed the command above: (it deletes the zip files on all the subfolders)
Deleted file - c:\xrar\pencil-0.4.4b-win.zip
Deleted file - c:\xrar\1\pencil-0.4.4b-win.zip
Deleted file - c:\xrar\1\2\pencil-0.4.4b-win.zip
Deleted file - c:\xrar\1\2\3\pencil-0.4.4b-win.zip
Deleted file - c:\xrar\1\2-1\pencil-0.4.4b-win.zip

That’s it no script needed, just a simple command line.

In this example I just use *.zip, you can replace *.doc* to delete all document files or *.xls* to delete excel files. Or any file extension that you wanted.
Just make sure you know exactly what you are doing, deletion is not a joke.



Cheers!! Hope it saves your time by doing the right deletion!! 

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