Batch delete all files and directories except specified file and directory [duplicate]

I’m trying to delete all files and directories in a specific directory using a bat file in said directory. I’ve seen this done on Linux without problem, but in Windows command environment it seems to be a chore.

Example: \temp\1.bat (keep) \temp\special folder (keep)

Inside \temp\ contains all the folders and files I want to delete except the 1.bat and the special folder.

I have tried recursive commands but they delete the directory, or they delete all the files and keep the directories.

But this remove everything. If I remove the rd line, it removes all the files, not the directories and keeps the 1.bat file (like I need).

But this doesn’t work either. I simply cannot get all the directories and files to be deleted except for the «special folder» and the «1.bat file».

Is this even possible?

2 Answers 2

You would need to change the setting of sourcedir , keepdir and keepfile to suit your circumstances. The listing uses a setting that suits my system.

The for/d command deals with all of the directories, except that where the name+extension matches the required name, then the for repeats the action on files in the target directory, deleteing all except that which matches the required filename-to-keep.

The following batch file could be used for this task:

for /F with dir is used instead of for /D to process also subdirectories with hidden attribute set. for /D ignores subdirectories with hidden attribute.

This batch file runs the directory cleanup on the directory passed as argument to the batch file. It makes the cleanup on current directory if batch file is started without any argument.

The batch file protects itself on being deleted on deleting files in current directory or in a specified target directory and batch file is in current directory or the specified target directory. But the batch file does not protect itself on being deleted if the batch file is stored in any subdirectory of the current directory or specified target directory.

There can be multiple /C:»Directory Name» arguments specified on second FOR command line to exclude multiple subfolders in target folder for being removed by the batch file.

There can be multiple /C:»File Name» arguments specified on third FOR command line to exclude multiple files in target folder for being removed by the batch file.

For understanding the used commands and how they work, open a command prompt window, execute there the following commands, and read entirely all help pages displayed for each command very carefully.

Read the Microsoft article about Using Command Redirection Operators for an explanation of 2>nul and | . The redirection operators > and | must be escaped with caret character ^ on both FOR command lines to be interpreted as literal characters when Windows command interpreter processes these command lines before executing command FOR which executes the embedded command line with dir and findstr in a separate command process started in background using %ComSpec% /c and the specified command line.

How to delete all files and folders in a folder by cmd call

I want to delete all files and folders in a folder by system call.

I may call like that:

Do you know an easier way?

12 Answers 12

No, I don’t know one.

If you want to retain the original directory for some reason (ACLs, &c.), and instead really want to empty it, then you can do the following:

This first removes all files from the directory, and then recursively removes all nested directories, but overall keeping the top-level directory as it is (except for its contents).

Note that within a batch file you need to double the % within the for loop:

del c:\destination\*.* /s /q worked for me. I hope that works for you as well.

I think the easiest way to do it is:

The last «\» in the path is the important part.

Yes! Use Powershell:

If the subfolder names may contain spaces you need to surround them in escaped quotes. The following example shows this for commands used in a batch file.

To delete folder with all files in it:

To delete all files from specific folder (not deleting folder itself) is a little bit complicated. del /s *.* cannot delete folders, but removes files from all subfolder. So two commands are needed:

You can create a script to delete whatever you want (folder or file) like this mydel.bat :

Few example of usage:

One easy one-line option is to create an empty directory somewhere on your file system, and then use ROBOCOPY (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733145.aspx) with the /MIR switch to remove all files and subfolders. By default, robocopy does not copy security, so the ACLs in your root folder should remain intact.

Also probably want to set a value for the retry switch, /r , because the default number of retries is 1 million.

I had an index folder with 33 folders that needed all the files and subfolders removed in them. I opened a command line in the index folder and then used these commands:

I separated them into two lines (hit enter after first line, and when asked for more add second line) because if entered on a single line this may not work. This command will erase each directory and then create a new one which is empty, thus removing all files and subflolders in the original directory.

Delete files or folder recursively on Windows CMD

How do I delete files or folders recursively on Windows from the command line?

I have found this solution where path we drive on the command line and run this command.

I have given an example with a .svn file extension folder:

12 Answers 12

The other answers didn’t work for me, but this did:

/q disables Yes/No prompting

/s means delete the file(s) from all subdirectories.

Please execute the following steps:

1. Open the command prompt
2. Change directory to the required path

Give the following command

You can use this in the bat script:

Now, just change c:\folder a to your folder’s location. Quotation is only needed when your folder name contains spaces.

ex. RMDIR «C:\tmp» /S

Note that you’ll be prompted if you’re really going to delete the «C:\tmp» folder. Combining it with /Q switch will remove the folder silently (ex. RMDIR «C:\tmp» /S /Q )

For file deletion, I wrote following simple batch file which deleted all .pdf’s recursively:

Even for the local directory we can use it as:

The same can be applied for directory deletion where we just need to change del with rmdir.

If you want to delete a specific extension recursively, use this:

You could also do:

The /p will prompt you for each found file, if you’re nervous about deleting something you shouldn’t.

After the blog post How Can I Use Windows PowerShell to Delete All the .TMP Files on a Drive?, you can use something like this to delete all .tmp for example from a folder and all subfolders in PowerShell:

Use the Windows rmdir command

That is, rmdir /S /Q C:\Temp

I’m also using the ones below for some years now, flawlessly.

Check out other options with: forfiles /?

Delete SQM/Telemetry in windows folder recursively

Delete windows TMP files recursively

Delete user TEMP files and folders recursively

How to delete files/subfolders in a specific directory at the command prompt in Windows

Say, there is a variable called %pathtofolder% , as it makes it clear it is a full path of a folder.

I want to delete every single file and subfolder in this directory, but not the directory itself.

But, there might be an error like ‘this file/folder is already in use’. when that happens, it should just continue and skip that file/folder.

Is there some command for this?

15 Answers 15

You can use this shell script to clean up the folder and files within C:\Temp source:

Create a batch file (say, delete.bat) containing the above command. Go to the location where the delete.bat file is located and then run the command: delete.bat

rmdir is my all time favorite command for the job. It works for deleting huge files and folders with subfolders. A backup is not created, so make sure that you have copied your files safely before running this command.

This silently removes the folder and all files and subfolders.

The simplest solution I can think of is removing the whole directory with

Then creating this directory again:

This will remove the folders and files and leave the folder behind.

. deletes all files and folders underneath the given directory, but not the directory itself.

. And FOR command line should be modified to for /F «eol=| delims=» %%I in (‘dir «%dir%\*» /AD /B 2^>nul’) do rd /Q /S «%dir%\%%I» because of FOR ignores directories with hidden attribute set. DIR with options /AD /B outputs all directories with just their names. BTW: dir is not a good name for an environment variable. – Mofi Jun 2 ’18 at 8:44

You’ll get an error message, tells you that the RMDIR command can’t access the current folder, thus it can’t delete it.

Update:

From this useful comment (thanks to Moritz Both), you may add && between, so RMDIR won’t run if the CD command fails (e.g. mistyped directory name):

/S: Deletes a directory tree (the specified directory and all its subdirectories, including all files).

/Q: Specifies quiet mode. Does not prompt for confirmation when deleting a directory tree. (Note that /q works only if /s is specified.)

I use Powershell

It will remove the contents of the folder, not the folder itself.

RD stands for REMOVE Directory.

/S : Delete all files and subfolders in addition to the folder itself. Use this to remove an entire folder tree.

/Q : Quiet — do not display YN confirmation

None of the answers as posted on 2018-06-01, with the exception of the single command line posted by foxidrive, really deletes all files and all folders/directories in %PathToFolder% . That’s the reason for posting one more answer with a very simple single command line to delete all files and subfolders of a folder as well as a batch file with a more complex solution explaining why all other answers as posted on 2018-06-01 using DEL and FOR with RD failed to clean up a folder completely.

The simple single command line solution which of course can be also used in a batch file:

This command line contains three commands executed one after the other.

The first command PUSHD pushes current directory path on stack and next makes %PathToFolder% the current directory for running command process.

This works also for UNC paths by default because of command extensions are enabled by default and in this case PUSHD creates a temporary drive letter that points to that specified network resource and then changes the current drive and directory, using the newly defined drive letter.

PUSHD outputs following error message to handle STDERR if the specified directory does not exist at all:

The system cannot find the path specified.

This error message is suppressed by redirecting it with 2>nul to device NUL.

The next command RD is executed only if changing current directory for current command process to specified directory was successful, i.e. the specified directory exists at all.

The command RD with the options /Q and /S removes a directory quietly with all subdirectories even if the specified directory contains files or folders with hidden attribute or with read-only attribute set. The system attribute does never prevent deletion of a file or folder.

Not deleted are:

Folders used as the current directory for any running process. The entire folder tree to such a folder cannot be deleted if a folder is used as the current directory for any running process.

Files currently opened by any running process with file access permissions set on file open to prevent deletion of the file while opened by the running application/process. Such an opened file prevents also the deletion of entire folder tree to the opened file.

Files/folders on which the current user has not the required (NTFS) permissions to delete the file/folder which prevents also the deletion of the folder tree to this file/folder.

The first reason for not deleting a folder is used by this command line to delete all files and subfolders of the specified folder, but not the folder itself. The folder is made temporarily the current directory for running command process which prevents the deletion of the folder itself. Of course this results in output of an error message by command RD:

The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

File is the wrong term here as in reality the folder is being used by another process, the current command process which executed command RD. Well, in reality a folder is for the file system a special file with file attribute directory which explains this error message. But I don’t want to go too deep into file system management.

This error message, like all other error messages, which could occur because of the three reasons written above, is suppressed by redirecting it with 2>nul from handle STDERR to device NUL.

The third command, POPD, is executed independently of the exit value of command RD.

POPD pops the directory path pushed by PUSHD from the stack and changes the current directory for running the command process to this directory, i.e. restores the initial current directory. POPD deletes the temporary drive letter created by PUSHD in case of a UNC folder path.

Note: POPD can silently fail to restore the initial current directory in case of the initial current directory was a subdirectory of the directory to clean which does not exist anymore. In this special case %PathToFolder% remains the current directory. So it is advisable to run the command line above not from a subdirectory of %PathToFolder% .

One more interesting fact: I tried the command line also using a UNC path by sharing local directory C:\Temp with share name Temp and using UNC path \\%COMPUTERNAME%\Temp\CleanTest assigned to environment variable PathToFolder on Windows 7. If the current directory on running the command line is a subdirectory of a shared local folder accessed using UNC path, i.e. C:\Temp\CleanTest\Subfolder1 , Subfolder1 is deleted by RD, and next POPD fails silently in making C:\Temp\CleanTest\Subfolder1 again the current directory resulting in Z:\CleanTest remaining as the current directory for the running command process. So in this very, very special case the temporary drive letter remains until the current directory is changed for example with cd /D %SystemRoot% to a local directory really existing. Unfortunately POPD does not exit with a value greater 0 if it fails to restore the initial current directory making it impossible to detect this very special error condition using just the exit code of POPD. However, it can be supposed that nobody ever runs into this very special error case as UNC paths are usually not used for accessing local files and folders.

For understanding the used commands even better, open a command prompt window, execute there the following commands, and read the help displayed for each command very carefully.

Next let us look on the batch file solution using the command DEL to delete files in %PathToFolder% and FOR and RD to delete the subfolders in %PathToFolder% .

The batch file first makes sure that environment variable PathToFolder is really defined with a folder path without double quotes and without a backslash at the end. The backslash at the end would not be a problem, but double quotes in a folder path could be problematic because of the value of PathToFolder is concatenated with other strings during batch file execution.

Important are the two lines:

The command DEL is used to delete all files in the specified directory.

• The option /A is necessary to process really all files including files with the hidden attribute which DEL would ignore without using option /A .
• The option /F is necessary to force deletion of files with the read-only attribute set.
• The option /Q is necessary to run a quiet deletion of multiple files without prompting the user if multiple files should be really deleted.
• >nul is necessary to redirect the output of the file names written to handle STDOUT to device NUL of which can’t be deleted because of a file is currently opened or user has no permission to delete the file.
• 2>nul is necessary to redirect the error message output for each file which can’t be deleted from handle STDERR to device NUL.

The commands FOR and RD are used to remove all subdirectories in specified directory. But for /D is not used because of FOR is ignoring in this case subdirectories with the hidden attribute set. For that reason for /F is used to run the following command line in a separate command process started in the background with %ComSpec% /c :

DIR outputs in bare format because of /B the directory entries with attribute D , i.e. the names of all subdirectories in specified directory independent on other attributes like the hidden attribute without a path. 2>nul is used to redirect the error message output by DIR on no directory found from handle STDERR to device NUL.

The redirection operator > must be escaped with the caret character, ^ , on the FOR command line to be interpreted as a literal character when the Windows command interpreter processes this command line before executing the command FOR which executes the embedded dir command line in a separate command process started in the background.

FOR processes the captured output written to handle STDOUT of a started command process which are the names of the subdirectories without path and never enclosed in double quotes.

FOR with option /F ignores empty lines which don’t occur here as DIR with option /B does not output empty lines.

FOR would also ignore lines starting with a semicolon which is the default end of line character. A directory name can start with a semicolon. For that reason eol=| is used to define the vertical bar character as the end-of-line character which no directory or file can have in its name.

FOR would split up the line into substrings using space and horizontal tab as delimiters and would assign only the first space/tab delimited string to specified loop variable I . This splitting behavior is not wanted here because of a directory name can contain one or more spaces. Therefore delims= is used to define an empty list of delimiters to disable the line splitting behavior and get assigned to the loop variable, I , always the complete directory name.

Command FOR runs the command RD for each directory name without a path which is the reason why on the RD command line the folder path must be specified once again which is concatenated with the subfolder name.

For understanding the used commands and how they work, open a command prompt window, execute there the following commands, and read entirely all help pages displayed for each command very carefully.