Change Details

Windows makes it annoyingly hard to actually wipe files and folders sometimes. It's not even that it's insisting on high permissions, it's that it's finicky and fiddly to apply the right permissions. The main two commands to use for permissions are `takeown` to take ownership, and `icacls` to change the ACL specifics to allow you to actually delete things. I suppose maybe these are useful for other things but when I'm on Windows I'm generally slashing and burning . . . ``` lang=powershell, name=example recursive deletion # Use takeown to recursively give ownership to a folder and its contents to the Adminstrators group takeown /A /R /F ".\some\path" # Then use icacls to recursively (via /T) grant the admin group full permissions icacls ".\some\path" /grant Administrators:F /T # If this Remove-Item invocation doesn't work, try appending "\*" to it, sometimes that works (though it doesn't delete the folder itself then) and sometimes it still fails but gives a more accurate error message Remove-item -Recurse -Force ".\some\path" ```

Windows makes it annoyingly hard to actually wipe files and folders sometimes. It's not even that it's insisting on high permissions, it's that it's finicky and fiddly to apply the right permissions. The main two commands to use for permissions are `takeown` to take ownership, and `icacls` to change the ACL specifics to allow you to actually delete things. I suppose maybe these are useful for other things but when I'm on Windows I'm generally slashing and burning . . . ``` lang=powershell, name=example recursive deletion # Assuming we pass the path (relative or absolute) to the folder to be deleted as the only argument to a PowerShell script $f=$args[0] # Use takeown to recursively give ownership to a folder and its contents to the Adminstrators group takeown /A /R /F "$f" # Then use icacls to recursively (via /T) grant the admin group full permissions icacls "$f" /grant Administrators:F /T # If this Remove-Item invocation doesn't work, try appending "\*" to it, sometimes that works (though it doesn't delete the folder itself then) and sometimes it still fails but gives a more accurate error message Remove-item -Recurse -Force "$f" ```

Windows makes it annoyingly hard to actually wipe files and folders sometimes. It's not even that it's insisting on high permissions, it's that it's finicky and fiddly to apply the right permissions. The main two commands to use for permissions are `takeown` to take ownership, and `icacls` to change the ACL specifics to allow you to actually delete things. I suppose maybe these are useful for other things but when I'm on Windows I'm generally slashing and burning . . . ``` lang=powershell, name=example recursive deletion # Assuming we pass the path (relative or absolute) to the folder to be deleted as the only argument to a PowerShell script $f=$args[0] # Use takeown to recursively give ownership to a folder and its contents to the Adminstrators group takeown /A /R /F ".\some\path""$f" # Then use icacls to recursively (via /T) grant the admin group full permissions icacls ".\some\path$f" /grant Administrators:F /T # If this Remove-Item invocation doesn't work, try appending "\*" to it, sometimes that works (though it doesn't delete the folder itself then) and sometimes it still fails but gives a more accurate error message Remove-item -Recurse -Force ".\some\path"$f" ```