“rm -rf” equivalent for Windows?

Question

I need a way to recursively delete a folder and its children.

Is there a prebuilt tool for this, or do I need to write one?

DEL /S doesn\'t dele

Answer 1

First, let’s review what rm -rf does:

C:\Users\ohnob\things>touch stuff.txt

C:\Users\ohnob\things>rm -rf stuff.txt

C:\Users\ohnob\things>mkdir stuff.txt

C:\Users\ohnob\things>rm -rf stuff.txt

C:\Users\ohnob\things>ls -l
total 0

C:\Users\ohnob\things>rm -rf stuff.txt

There are three scenarios where rm -rf is commonly used where it is expected to return 0:

1. The specified path does not exist.
2. The specified path exists and is a directory.
3. The specified path exists and is a file.

I’m going to ignore the whole permissions thing, but nobody uses permissions or tries to deny themselves write access on things in Windows anyways (OK, that’s meant to be a joke…).

First set ERRORLEVEL to 0 and then delete the path only if it exists, using different commands depending on whether or not it is a directory. IF EXIST does not set ERRORLEVEL to 0 if the path does not exist, so setting the ERRORLEVEL to 0 first is necessary to properly detect success in a way that mimics normal rm -rf usage. Guarding the RD with IF EXIST is necessary because RD, unlike rm -f, will throw an error if the target does not exist.

The following script snippet assumes that DELPATH is prequoted. (This is safe when you do something like SET DELPATH=%1. Try putting ECHO %1 in a .cmd and passing it an argument with spaces in it and see what happens for yourself). After the snippet completes, you can check for failure with IF ERRORLEVEL 1.

: # Determine whether we need to invoke DEL or RD or do nothing.
SET DELPATH_DELMETHOD=RD
PUSHD %DELPATH% 2>NUL
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 (SET DELPATH_DELMETHOD=DEL) ELSE (POPD)
IF NOT EXIST %DELPATH% SET DELPATH_DELMETHOD=NOOP
: # Reset ERRORLEVEL so that the last command which
: # otherwise set it does not cause us to falsely detect
: # failure.
CMD /C EXIT 0
IF %DELPATH_DELMETHOD%==DEL DEL /Q %DELPATH%
IF %DELPATH_DELMETHOD%==RD RD /S /Q %DELPATH%

Point is, everything is simpler when the environment just conforms to POSIX. Or if you install a minimal MSYS and just use that.