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Clean up your Visual Studio bin folder by using Powershell

Every once in a while,  my hard disks got filled up.Today it happened again. I knew that a lot of disk space was eaten up by compiled code living inside the bin folder of all my projects. After a rough estimate I ended up with 12 GB of compiled code! I could have started by opening up every project folder and manually delete every bin folder. Luckily Powershell just made that job a whole lot easier.

Here’s the command to remove all obj & bin folders from a path (assuming you’re in the path now):

   1:  Get-ChildItem .\ -include bin -Recurse | foreach ($_) { remove-item $_.fullname -Force -Recurse }

If you’re not in the correct folder just replace .\ with the full or relative path. You’ll still need to close down Visual Studio first, the -Force switch will override permission failures, but not process locks.

Note: this does a forced delete without prompting for confirmation, so you’d better be really sure you want it all gone. If you don’t want to take any risk first add  -WhatIf after the last -Recurse to do a dry run first to see what will be deleted, i.e.:

   1:  Get-ChildItem .\ -include bin -Recurse | foreach ($_) { remove-item $_.fullname -Force -Recurse -WhatIf
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