Deleting Directories Using Single Liner Command

Deleting directories using single liner command

rm -r edi edw

rm can take an arbitrary number of arguments, and the -r flag makes it delete directories recursively. Refer to man rm for more details.

Reading manual pages are the best way to get information for your questions.

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

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

del /q "C:\Temp\*"
FOR /D %%p IN ("C:\Temp\*.*") DO rmdir "%%p" /s /q

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

Delete multiple directories with a single batch file

for %%a in ("dirname 1" "dirname2" "as many as you want") do rd /s /q "%%~a"

should do what you want - %%a is set to each [optionally-quoted] argument in turn. You Must use the quotes if the directoryname contains separators like spaces.

Delete a directory and its files using command line but don't throw error if it doesn't exist

Redirect the output of the del command to nul. Note the 2, to indicate error output should be redirected. See also this question, and especially the tech doc Using command redirection operators.

del {whateveroptions} 2>null

Or you can check for file existence before calling del:

if exist c:\folder\file del c:\folder\file

Note that you can use if exist c:\folder\ (with the trailing \) to check if c:\folder is indeed a folder and not a file.

Need windows batch command one-liner to remove folders by name, not by date.time using powershell if applicable

The PowerShell code for this would be:

Get-ChildItem -Path 'RootPath\Where\The\Folders\To\Delete\Are\Found' -Filter '*_*_*' -Directory |
    Where-Object { $_.Name -match '\d{2}_\d{2}_\d{4}' } |                   # filter some more using regex -match
    Sort-Object { [datetime]::ParseExact($_.Name, 'MM_dd_yyyy', $null) } |  # sort by date
    Select-Object -SkipLast 7 |                                             # skip the newest 7 folders
    Remove-Item -Recurse -Force                                             # remove the rest

To play it safe, add -WhatIf to the final Remove-Item command. By doing that, the code does not actually delete anything, but show in the console what would be deleted. If you are satisfied that is correct, then remove -WhatIf to actually remove those folders.

As Olaf already commented, don't think using one-line code would be best, because what you'll end up with is code that isn't readable anymore and where mistakes are extremely hard to find.
There is no penalty whatsoever for multiline code, in fact it is THE way to go!

How to delete a folder and all contents using a bat file in windows?

@RD /S /Q "D:\PHP_Projects\testproject\Release\testfolder"

Explanation:

Removes (deletes) a directory.

RMDIR [/S] [/Q] [drive:]path RD [/S] [/Q] [drive:]path

/S      Removes all directories and files in the specified directory
        in addition to the directory itself.  Used to remove a directory
        tree.

/Q      Quiet mode, do not ask if ok to remove a directory tree with /S

CMD to delete a specific folder with files from multiple folder paths

First, as explained by the Microsoft documentation Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces, the directory separator on Windows is \ and not / as on Linux/Mac. / is used on Windows for options as you can see on your code for example on /Q. So use in future \ in file/folder paths. The Windows file system accessing kernel functions automatically replace all forward slashes by backslashes before accessing the file systems, but writing code depending on automatic error correction is never a good idea.

The task to delete all folders with name log or log-archive in a specified folder and all its subfolders can be done with a single command line.

@for /F "delims=" %%I in ('dir "%ProgramFiles%\product\plugins\plugin_Path\log*" /AD /B /S 2^>nul ^| %SystemRoot%\System32\findstr.exe /E /I /R "\\log \\log-archive"') do @rd /Q /S "%%I" 2>nul

FOR with option /F runs in a separate command process started with cmd.exe /C (more precise with %ComSpec% /C) in background the command line in '... ' which is here:

dir "C:\Program Files\product\plugins\plugin_Path\log*" /AD /B /S 2>nul | C:\Windows\System32\findstr.exe /E /I /R "\\log \\log-archive"

The command DIR outputs to handle STDOUT

in bare format because of option /B
just directories because of option /AD (attribute directory)
directory names matching the wildcard pattern log*
in specified directory C:\Program Files\product\plugins\plugin_Path
and all its subdirectories because of option /S
with full path also because of option /S.

It could be that DIR does not find any file system entry matching these criteria. In this case an error message is output by DIR to handle STDERR. This error output is redirected with 2>nul to device NUL to suppress it.

The standard output of DIR is redirected with | to handle STDIN of FINDSTR which runs

because of option /I a case-insensitive
regular expression find explicitly requested with option /R
for string \log or \log-archive (space is interpreted as OR)
which must be found at end of a line because of option /E.

All lines matching these search criteria are output by FINDSTR to handle STDOUT of background command process. This filtering of output of DIR with FINDSTR is necessary to avoid the deletion of a directory which is named for example LogToKeep also found and output by DIR.

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 FOR command line to be interpreted as literal characters when Windows command interpreter processes this command line before executing command FOR which executes the embedded command line with using a separate command process started in background.

FOR with option /F captures output to handle STDOUT of started command process and processes this output line by line after started cmd.exe terminated itself. Empty lines are always ignored by FOR which do not occur here. Lines starting with a semicolon are also ignored by default because of eol=; is the default definition for end of line option. But a full qualified folder path cannot contain a semicolon at beginning because the folder path starts either with a drive letter or with a backslash in case of a UNC path. So default end of line option can be kept in this case. FOR would split up by default every line into substrings with using normal space and horizontal tab as string delimiters and would assign just first space/tab separated string to specified loop variable. This line splitting behavior is not wanted here as the folder path contains definitely a space character and the entire folder path is needed and not just the string up to first space. For that reason delims= is used to specify an empty list of delimiters which disables line splitting behavior.

FOR executes for every directory output by DIR passing FINDSTR filter with full path the command RD to remove the directory quietly because of option /Q and with all files and subdirectories because of /S.

The deletion of the directory could fail because of missing NTFS permissions, or the directory to delete or one of its subdirectories is current directory of a running process, or a file in the directory to delete is currently opened by a running process in a manner which denies deletion of the file while being opened, or the directory to delete does not exist anymore because it was deleted already before in FOR loop. The error message output by command RD to handle STDERR is in this case redirected to device NUL to suppress it.

Please note that command RD deletes all log and log-archives directories and not just the files and subdirectories in these directories. It is unclear from your question what exactly should be deleted by the batch file.

It is of course also possible to replace rd /Q /S "%%I" by del /A /F /Q "%%I\*" to delete just all files including hidden and read-only files quietly in the directory assigned with full path to loop variable I.

@ left to command FOR and command RD just suppress the output of those commands before execution by Windows command processor cmd.exe. Both @ are not needed if this single command line is used in a batch file containing before @echo off.

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.

del /?
dir /?
findstr /?
for /?
rd /?

Delete all files and folders in a directory

del *.* instead of del *.db. That will remove everything.

How to delete the contents of a folder?

import os, shutil
folder = '/path/to/folder'
for filename in os.listdir(folder):
    file_path = os.path.join(folder, filename)
    try:
        if os.path.isfile(file_path) or os.path.islink(file_path):
            os.unlink(file_path)
        elif os.path.isdir(file_path):
            shutil.rmtree(file_path)
    except Exception as e:
        print('Failed to delete %s. Reason: %s' % (file_path, e))

Deleting Directories Using Single Liner Command