Deleting Files and Directories

windows

All righty, now that we've learned how to list, create and move around files and directories, let's start removing them.

🗑️ Deleting Files in the Windows GUI

In the Windows GUI, if you wanted to remove a file or folder, just right click and delete. The file ends up in the recycle bin, which you can find on your desktop. If you wanted to restore a file here, you could just right click and restore. If you empty your bin for any reason, you won't be able to retrieve of those files.

🗑️ Deleting Files in PowerShell

In PowerShell, the command to remove files and directories is RM or remove. Take caution when using remove because it doesn't use the recycle bin. Once the files or directories are removed, they're gone for good. Let's remove a file called text1.txt in my home directory. We can see, there it is, I'm just going to remove it. And now it's gone.

⚠️ Permissions and Confirmation

The remove command might seem like a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. Fortunately, there are safety measures in place that only give this ability to users that are actually authorized to use it. We'll talk more about file permissions in a different lesson, but let's take a quick look at what I mean. Let's remove a file called important_system_file. I get an error message saying that I don't have permission to delete this file. In some cases like this one, it's because it's been marked as a system file. In other cases, it might be because I don't have enough permissions in the file system to remove the file. I do have the right permissions this time, but since it is an important file, PowerShell wants to make sure that I meant to do this. If I repeat the command with the -Force parameter, remove will go ahead and remove the file.

🗂️ Deleting Directories

Okay, let's try removing a directory with remove next. Here we go. Here's another place where PowerShell is going to ask us if we really meant to do this. Since this is in a directory, it contains other files, and we do not use the -Recurse parameter. We see a prompt asking us to confirm if we really want to remove the directory and all its contents. We can say yes or yes to all to continue. We can also cancel this command and run it again with a -Recurse parameter. That way, PowerShell knows that we understand the consequences of what we're doing. So let's go ahead and cancel this and try again, -Recurse. Yep, now it's gone.

⚠️ Caution with remove

And that's the remove command in a nutshell. Again, because of the nature of this command, you'll want to be extra careful when removing files or directories.

Linux

🗑️ Deleting Files and Directories in Linux

To remove files from Linux, just like in Windows, we can use the rm or remove command. Let's remove this text1 file. Just like that, it's gone.

⚠️ Permissions and Confirmation

Similar to Windows, we get a message if we try to remove something that we shouldn't be able to. Let's remove this self_destruct_button. Awesome. Everything is working as intended.

🗂️ Deleting Directories

Next, let's try removing a directory. If you thought to yourself that we need to also recursively remove this directory, you'd be right. Excellent deduction skills, so rm -r. Let's remove the misc_folder directory. If we check, the misc_folder is now gone.

⚠️ Caution with rm

Remember, when using rm command, take extra precaution that you aren't removing something important by accident.