Deleting all bin and obj folders from a solution
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 at 10:29PM
James in Computers, Programming, automation, bin, obj, powershell, script, scripting, visualstudio

Quick little post.

Since reading The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas I've been looking for ways to automate tasks whenever I find myself doing something I know I'm going to repeat later or I'm repeating right there and then.

The other day I was working on a VisualStudio Solution someone else had started and when trying to build it found they had checked in some of the bin and obj folders.

So I open up the root folder of the solution and prepare to trawl through about a dozen projects to delete all the bin and obj files. Obviously noticing that I'm about to do the same steps repeatedly and this will happen in the future I went and did a quick search to see if anyone else had already solved this.

Awesomely someone had.

So a huge thanks to Glenn at Development on a shoestring for providing exactly what I needed. I'm putting this here just in case his site should disappear and take the knowledge with it.

I threw the following into a powershell script that sits in source control ready for use in the future

# Iterate through all subdirectories and delete all bin and obj folders
# http://blog.slaven.net.au/2006/11/22/use-powershell-to-delete-all-bin-obj-folders/
# Had to use it for getting rid of a bunch of bin and obj folders in a PoC but thought it smart to put in here for other to use
Get-ChildItem .\ -include bin,obj -Recurse | foreach ($_) { remove-item $_.fullname -Force -Recurse }
RemoveAllBinAndObjFolders.ps1
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