node-purgewindir

A small Node.js program that deletes a directory by deleting every subdirectory recursively starting with the deepest nested subdirectories first.

##Background

I ran into a situation on a Windows 2008R2 machine where I as the owner of the directory with subdirectories, wasn't able to delete that directory.

Folder Access Denied. You'll need to provide administrator permission to delete this folder. And after hitting Continue -> You need permission to perform this action.

I tried resetting the owner and inheritable permissions of all sub directories, but It didn't work for me.

What did work was to delete every subdirectory starting with the deepest nested first as described by this answer on superuser.com. I decided to build this program to automate that.

##Install and run

1. Create a directory next to the directory you'd like to delete
2. cd into it
3. run npm install purgewindir
4. run node node_modules\purgewindir ../name_of_the_directory_you_want_to_delete

##Delete itself

Finally, you can use this program to delete itself too.

run node node_modules\purgewindir ./

After deleting all subdirectory of itself, it'll finally fail on the directory itself, but you can delete that one manually.