Please help with basic PowerShell to a newbie

[wm.m.thompson]

I am familiar with dos commands but powershell commands are new to me.

I have been tasked with writing a powershell command script that does two things:

1. Deletes the contents (all subfolders and the contents of the subfolders) under a particular folder
2. remove a shortcut from the desktop

if that can not be done with simple commands, maybe the steps need to be broken down:

1. gets a list of subdirectores under a directory
2. navigates to each of these directories and deltetes the contents
3. remove the subdirectories
4. then remove shortcuts from the desktop.

 

[wm.m.thompson]

I am familiar with dos commands but powershell commands are new to me.

I have been tasked with writing a powershell command script that does two things:

1. Deletes the contents (all subfolders and the contents of the subfolders) under a particular folder
2. remove a shortcut from the desktop

if that can not be done with simple commands, maybe the steps need to be broken down:

1. gets a list of subdirectores under a directory
2. navigates to each of these directories and deltetes the contents
3. remove the subdirectories
4. then remove shortcuts from the desktop.

 

[Norton]

If you look a little deeper into Power shell settings there is a list of commands.
Open Powershell, at the cursor type "get-command" (without the " ") it lists a thousand or more commands with an explanation of what each command does when executed. Hope this is what you're looking for.

 

[Regedit32]

Hi wm.m.thompson,

The simplest way to do that would be using Recursion.

For example:

# Set path to directory that stores the
# files and/or subfolders you wish to delete
# In this example, the path is C:\Users\[username of signed-in User]\Desktop\test"
$path = "$env:userprofile\Desktop\test"

Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Recurse | Foreach-Object { Remove-Item -Recurse -path $_.FullName }


# How this works is as follows:
# Get-ChildItem will be assigned the $path you set.  In this case:  C:\Users\[username of signed-in User]\Desktop\test
# -Path $path is the flag and variable that tells it what ChildItem is [the Directory named "test"] and the path to that Directory
# -Recurse is a flag that instructs the continual scanning of ChildItem until the task on other side of pipe "|" is completed
# | is the aforementioned pipe
# Foreach-Object i.e. each file and/or subfolder inside the ChildItem which is "test" folder on Desktop
# { Remove-Item -Recurse -Path $_FullName }
#     The Remove-Item cmdlet (pronounced command-let) means what it says!  It deletes the item if it exists.
#     The -Recurse flag will ask it to continue until no items exist
#     The -Path is set to $_FullName
#         $_FullName is a RESERVED variable that provides two things:
#           (1) Full path to object, and
#           (2) objects' name.

#           e.g C:\Users\[username of signed-in User]\Desktop\test\file.doc
#           e.g C:\Users\[username of signed-in User]\Desktop\test\subfolder\anotherSubfolder\

The result being that the test Directory will remain on the Desktop, but any subfolders or files that were inside the test Directory will be deleted.