weird issue with "del" command

[Red Squirrel]

I'm executing this command on a system to delete all the temp files but for some reason it's ignoring the folders:

del /f /s /q *.*

I'm in the folder I want to delete everything from.

For whatever reason it does not do the subdirectories. If I remove /q it does, but I can't sit there all day hitting Y key. Has anyone seen this happen before? This is windows xp.

 

[rdp6]

deltree? it has been years since I've used DOS

 

[Red Squirrel]

They removed it in winme I think, it's never been available since. I used to love that command back in 98 days. deltree /y *.*

 

[Fardringle]

Try using the RMDIR command instead. The syntax is RMDIR /s /q <folder name>. You can replace RMDIR with RD if five characters are too many to type. 😉

So if you want to delete all files and all subfolders in a folder named "Temp", use: RMDIR /s /q temp. This has the same effect as deltree.

 

[Red Squirrel]

No luck with athat either but it turned out the order of the del parameters matters. I can't recall the order that worked now though. Windows command prompt is messed. Prefer Linux. That and I always do rm -rf * then realize that wont work 😛

 

[chronodekar]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
No luck with athat either but it turned out the order of the del parameters matters. I can't recall the order that worked now though. Windows command prompt is messed. Prefer Linux. That and I always do rm -rf * then realize that wont work 😛

I lost count how many times I typed in "ls" in my XP command prompt before realizing what OS I was in !! 🙂