Dos command to remove a directory with files

Hello, I have four folders and I want to keep two of them along with their contents and delete other two folders. How can I do that? Need to delete or remove 2 folders and keep 2 folder with their content. Need command for this. Any help will be appreciated. I want to thank you very much for the help on deleting these files. I ended up using the CMD method, but it worked perfectly.

Again, thank you!!!! Thank you! This did the trick hoping. I tried the command, but someone has created the directory repeatedly and now I can not removed the base directory. ZIP — The file name is too long. ZIP is too long. Just cd further down and delete the individual files until you can delete the whole directory. Really this blog keeps changing my life. Active 8 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 7k times. I want to delete the directory and the files contained within the directory.

Aaron Is PowerShell an option for you? I made an edit to try to show your command properly. Is that correct? Powershell is not an option that I am aware of. This is the first time that I ever wrote a dos prompt command. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. I realize this is stupid, but trust me I can get stoopiderer. I can show you a vbscript that uses the folders collection of the Scripting. FileSystemObject to do this as well.

Or we can get totally crunked and use WMI to do this!!! S - I think I've had to much sugar today. S - Eat nachos. I cheated. I Googled. I am also a CRS poster child You will be prompted with an "Are you sure" question that lets you back out in case you entered the wrong directory name.

No prompt will be displayed. How do I assign the correct security settings to the new directory? We have already discussed that you can view the contents of the working directory by typing in Dir in Command Prompt.

If it will not, the action would not be taken. The commands in Windows PowerShell to delete and remove content from your PC are very much similar to those of Command Prompt, with a few additional aliases.

The overall functionality and logic are the same. We recommend that you launch Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges before proceeding. The main thing to note here is that unlike Command Prompt, all commands can be used for both purposes — removing individual files as well as complete directories. We ask you to be careful while using PowerShell to delete files and folders, as the directory itself is also removed.

The good thing is that you do not need to specify recursive action. If a directory has sub-directories, PowerShell will confirm whether you wish to continue with your deletion, which will also include all child objects subdirectories. We tested all of these commands in our working directory and each of them was successful in deleting the folders as well as individual items, as can be seen below:.

As can be seen above, the syntax of all the aliases is the same. You can use any of the commands below to delete an item using PowerShell:. You can also delete multiple selective files and folders just as we did while using Command Prompt. The only difference is that you will need to provide the complete path of each item, even if you are in the same working directory. Remember to append the file type if the item is not a directory.

You can also remove an item in a different directory, just like we did in Command Prompt. Simply enter the complete path to the item in PowerShell, as we have done below:.

Sometimes you may encounter an error while trying to delete an item that may suggest that the path is too long, or the item cannot be deleted as it is buried too deep.