Delete directory regardless of 260 char limit

Question

I'm writing a simple script to delete USMT migration folders after a certain amount of days:

## Server List ## $servers = "Delorean","Adelaide","Brisbane","Melbourne","Newcastle","Perth"  ## Number of days (-3 is over three days ago) ## $days = -3  $timelimit = (Get-Date).AddDays($days)  foreach ($server in $servers) {     $deletedusers = @()     $folders = Get-ChildItem \\$server\USMT$ | where {$_.psiscontainer}     write-host "Checking server : " $server     foreach ($folder in $folders)      {         If ($folder.LastWriteTime -lt $timelimit -And $folder -ne $null)         {             $deletedusers += $folder             Remove-Item -recurse -force $folder.fullname         }     }         write-host "Users deleted : " $deletedusers         write-host } 

However I keep hitting the dreaded Remove-Item : The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.

I've been looking at workarounds and alternatives but they all revolve around me caring what is in the folder.

I was hoping for a more simple solution as I don't really care about the folder contents if it is marked for deletion.

Is there any native Powershell cmdlet other than Remove-Item -recurse that can accomplish what I'm after?

Answer 1

I often have this issue with node projects. They nest their dependencies and once git cloned, it's difficult to delete them. A nice node utility I came across is rimraf.

npm install rimraf -g rimraf <dir> 

Answer 2

Just as CADII said in another answer: Robocopy is able to create paths longer than the limit of 260 characters. Robocopy is also able to delete such paths. You can just mirror some empty folder over your path containing too long names in case you want to delete it.

For example:

robocopy C:\temp\some_empty_dir E:\temp\dir_containing_very_deep_structures /MIR 

Here's the Robocopy reference to know the parameters and various options.