Powershell Command: rm -rf

Question

rm is to remove item, but what is the parameter -rf do or signify?

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Whenever I typed help -rf it printed the entire list of available commands in powershell. What happens if you type rm -rf in powershell? From reading around I've gathered that it will delete everything on the drive? I'm not sure?

Also, is rm -rf same as rm -rf /?

Ragi

Answer 1

PowerShell isn't UNIX. rm -rf is UNIX shell code, not PowerShell scripting.

• This is the documentation for rm (short for Remove-Item) on PowerShell.
• This is the documentation for rm on UNIX.

See the difference?

On UNIX, rm -rf alone is invalid. You told it what to do via rm for remove with the attributes r for recursive and f for force, but you didn't tell it what that action should be done on. rm -rf /path/to/delete/ means rm (remove) with attributes r (recursive) and f (force) on the directory /path/to/remove/ and its sub-directories.

The correct, equivalent command on PowerShell would be:

rm C:\path\to\delete -r -fo

Note that -f in PowerShell is ambiguous for -Filter and -Force and thus -fo needs to be used.

Harlin

For completeness, the PowerShell equivalent would be rm \ -r -f. You can abbreviate parameter names in PowerShell, but you can't stack them. – Bergman

This answer is incorrect. If you do rm <path> -r -f in PowerShell, but the path does not exist, an exception is thrown. In unix, if you run rm -rf <path> on a path which does not exist, the command exits successfully. The two commands are not equivalent. – Oakum

The PowerShell equivalent is (no longer?) true. If you do that you will receive an error Remove-Item : Parameter cannot be processed because the parameter name 'f' is ambiguous. Possible matches include: -Filter -Force. You can use rm C:\path\to\delete -r -fo however. – Potvaliant

The PowerShell command does not work. When I try rm path\to\delete -r -fo I get error message: Remove-Item: Cannot remove item path\to\delete: The directory is not empty. : 'path\to\delete' I am using PS version 7.1.1 – Diedrediefenbaker

I found out why (where) the PS command does not work. If I try it in a folder handled by OneDrive it fails, but it works otherwise. Microsoft please fixit! – Diedrediefenbaker

and if (when) you get permissions errors, see this post: #43768293 (shut down applications that may have a lock on the files/folders you're trying to delete). – Annular

Answer 2

You have to use:

Remove-Item C:\tmp -Recurse -Force

or (short)

rm C:\tmp -Recurse -Force

Lombok

So.. waht does rm -rf / does in powershell? – Ragi

Gotcha, you didn't specify at first, so I wasn't sure. – Ragi

Answer 3

This is the one-liner that behaves like rm -rf. It first checks for the existence of the path and then tries removing it.

if (Test-Path ./your_path) { rm -r -force ./your_path}

Flat

Thank you that's the right answer I was looking for. Many people forget that UNIX's -f actually allows to silently ignore a nonexistent directory. – Savour