PowerShell cmdLet Remove-Item

Delete a file if it exists

If remove-item is used to delete a file that does not exist, PowerShell answers with a Cannot find path … because it does not exist error message.

In order to suppress this error message, test-path can be used to determine if a file exists. Combined with an if statement, this results in something like:

if (test-path foo.txt) {
  remove-item foo.txt
}

Of course, even easier is to ignore the potential error message with the -errorAction option:

remove-item foo.txt -errorAction ignore

Delete directories and subdirectories

In order to delete a directory with its subdirectories, both, the -recurse and the -force option need to be specified:

remove-item subDir -force -recurse

Without -force, the cmdLet write the error message Directory … cannot be removed because it is not empty.

Deleting multiple items / A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument …

When multiple items need to be deleted, their names need to separated by a comma.

This idiosyncrasy might take some getting used to for someone used to the cmd.exe del or Unix rm command.

The reason for this speciality it that remove-item expects an array for the path parameter.

The following command deletes the files foo.txt, bar.txt and baz.txt:

PS C:\users\rene\> remove-item foo.txt, bar.txt, baz.txt

Without commas, the PowerShell interpreter would throw the error message A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument.

Option -LiteralPath

The option -literalPath forces remove-item to not interpret wildcards (such as brackets):

$fileName = 'a file with [brackets] in its name.abc'

$null = new-item $fileName
remove-item $fileName

#
#  File still exists
#
get-childItem *.abc

#
#  Use -literalPath to remove file with brackets
#
remove-item -literalPath $fileName

Github repository about-PowerShell, path: /cmdlets/item/remove/literalPath.ps1

Cannot remove item …: The process cannot access the file '…' because it is being used by another process

PS:> rm c:\users\rene\xyz.txt
rm : Cannot remove item C:\Users\Rene\xyz.txt: The process cannot access the file 'C:\Users\Rene\xyz.txt' because it is being used by another process.

TODO:openfiles.exe didn't report which process blocked the file from being deleted - but was reported in the Resource Monitor (resmon.exe).

Aliases

Aliases for remove-item are erase, del and rmdir.