How do I delete a read-only file?

Question

I've got a junk directory where I toss downloads, one-off projects, email drafts, and other various things that might be useful for a few days but don't need to be saved forever. To stop this directory from taking over my machine, I wrote a program that will delete all files older than a specified number of days and logs some statistics about the number of files deleted and their size just for fun.

I noticed that a few project folders were living way longer than they should, so I started to investigate. In particular, it seemed that folders for projects in which I had used SVN were sticking around. It turns out that the read-only files in the .svn directories are not being deleted. I just did a simple test on a read-only file and discovered that System.IO.File.Delete and System.IO.FileInfo.Delete will not delete a read-only file.

I don't care about protecting files in this particular directory; if something important is in there it's in the wrong place. Is there a .NET class that can delete read-only files, or am I going to have to check for read-only attributes and strip them?

Mononucleosis

I changed the accepted answer because Gulzar's code sample is more detailed than Tim Stewart's. Should've chose that one in the first place but for some reason I liked Tim's better. People are strange things! – Mononucleosis

+1 for taking the time to make things a little more right in the universe. If only my developers would go back and correct our own minor transgressions, we'd be able to cancel the Remedial Programming classes! – Freese

Answer 1

According to File.Delete's documentation,, you'll have to strip the read-only attribute. You can set the file's attributes using File.SetAttributes().

using System.IO;

File.SetAttributes(filePath, FileAttributes.Normal);
File.Delete(filePath);

Corella

You get an upvote for being right, but your answer came in after Tim Stewart's which said the same thing. – Mononucleosis

In some cases you may also need to take ownership of the file before you can clear the readonly flag or delete it. See stackoverflow.com/questions/12999272 for details. – Ontologism

Answer 2

According to File.Delete's documentation,, you'll have to strip the read-only attribute. You can set the file's attributes using File.SetAttributes().

Archimandrite

It's not about being first. – Discourse

Answer 3

The equivalent if you happen to be working with a FileInfo object is:

file.IsReadOnly = false;
file.Delete();

Reprehensible

Answer 4

Why do you need to check? Just forcibly clear the read-only flag and delete the file.

Freese

Answer 5

Hm, I think I'd rather put

>del /F *

into a sheduled task. Maybe wrapped by a batch file for logging statistics.

Am I missing something?

Transpadane

Yes. He wants to delete A file when it is of particular age. Not all the files every period. – Rotz

He doesn't want to delete all files, just all files older than a certain amount of time. – Archimandrite

Answer 6

To recursively delete a directory which contains read-only files you can do something like this:

public static void DeleteRecursive(DirectoryInfo target)
{
    if (!target.Exists)
    {
        return;
    }

    foreach (var file in target.EnumerateFiles())
    {
        if (file.IsReadOnly)
        {
            file.IsReadOnly = false;
        }

        file.Delete();
    }

    foreach (var dir in target.EnumerateDirectories())
    {
        DeleteRecursive(dir);
    }

    target.Delete();
}

Rugged