Thursday, December 07, 2006

Easy Way To Remove Folder Structure in Windows

I'm in the process of switching from CVS to SVN. I wanted to remove all the underlying "CVS" directories for my projects--I first thought to write a recursive batch file that would search and destroy all CVS folders. Frankly, however, I did not really want to spend time looking up old DOS batch commands. J. Lester and T. Scott had the idea to use Windows Search functionality (yes, I know, hard to believe it's good for something). Basically, (1) open the folder that you want to recursively delete some files/folders in, (2) then open the Search box, enter your search criteria, (3) select files and delete. It's that easy; see below:

(1) Open folder of interest

(2) Search

(3) Select and delete

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice tip! Real time saver! I just wanted to cleanup an archive with over two thousands of these files and it took me a few seconds.

It is nice to notice that sometimes we don't have to script something right away, we can do it with conventional software and a less common usage scenario.

soundasever said...

Normally I'd look to do this using a script, but this is just too easy.
Great solution.

Thanks.

Anonymous said...

"cvs export" would have been your friend, as it creates a CVS-free directorystructure of your module. Just to add this to this otherwise great article. :D

Anonymous said...

This really helped me!! Thank you very much! As another programmer I was looking for a script solution but yours was so easy that it was amazing!!