Delete really long paths and nested directories in windows using a Robocopy one line script

Posted on June 8, 2012 in Tutorials

So, if you ever ran into a really long nested folder structure with really long names – cleaning up those files might be ugly since it gives you the “file too long to be deleted” error in Windows.

There are some workarounds with the SFN : short file names – installing 3rd party tools or creating a batch file to recursively rename/shorten/delete folders and files.

but another more simple alternative is the following:

• create an empty folder called “sourcefolder”
• in command line, browse to your directory, run the following command :

robocopy /purge sourcefolder really_shitty_folder_with_nested_long_files

What will happen is that robocopy will synchronize the 2 folders and deletes what doesn’t exist in source.
The source being an empty folder – robocopy will recursively delete everything.

Simple ;p