PowerShell Basics: How to Delete Files Older Than X Days

Hi AnthonyBartolo 

Thanks for providing this script which is exactly what I am looking for.

There's one big problem with your script that I have noticed in testing, is that it doesn't seem to count files in the subfolders of a folder as being "contents" of the grandparent folder, so if you have a nested folder with files in that are within the date range that we want to keep, it skips them in the "file pass" but when it does the "folder pass" it sees the top level folder as being empty (even though it has a subfolder with legitimate files within it) and deletes that along with all the recent files in the subfolder......

When I run it manually it comes up with a prompt "CONFIRM: The item at Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::C:\TESTING\FOLDER_CONTAINING_SUBFOLDERS_CONTAINING_FILES has children and the Recurse parameter was not specified. If you continue, all children will be removed with the item. Are you sure you want to continue?"

I can see that there does seem to be a recurse command in the 

#Delete empty folders and subfolders

section, so I am not sure where it thinks another one needs to be added?

Please could you advise as to how I would resolve this behaviour which is clearly incorrect and also remove the manual prompt that it is generating (although that actually saved the legitimate files in this instance and maybe won't pop up when the script is working correctly).

Either way that need to be rectified too as this script needs to run as an automated process?

Thanks!

I wrote this script for CreateTempDrive, it creates a drive based on a temporary folder. All contents in that folder will be automatically removed after a certain retention periond.      

This scripts runs daily to clean a folder of all items which are older than the retention period. It will also delete any empty folders that deleting the files have caused. It supports an optional rundate and the generic -whatif and -confirm parameters.
This way you can see which files and folders will be removed in a folder when you run the command on a certain date.  

[CmdletBinding(SupportsShouldProcess)]
param (
    [Parameter(Mandatory)]
    [IO.DirectoryInfo] $path,
    [TimeSpan] $retentionPeriod = [TimeSpan]::FromDays(14),
    [DateTime] $now = [DateTime]::MinValue
)

if ($now -eq [DateTime]::MinValue) {

    $now = (Get-Date)
}

$oldFiles = Get-ChildItem $path.FullName -Recurse -File | ?{ $_.LastWriteTime -lt $now.Subtract($retentionPeriod) }
$folders = Get-ChildItem $path.FullName -Recurse -Directory 

$emptyFolders = $folders `
    | ?{ (Get-ChildItem $_.FullName -file -Recurse | ?{ $_.LastWriteTime -gt $now.Subtract($retentionPeriod) }) -eq $null } `
    | Sort-Object -Property @{ Expression={ $_.FullName.Split([IO.Path]::DirectorySeparatorChar).Count }; Descending=$true }  

$oldFiles | Remove-Item -Force
$emptyFolders | Remove-Item -Force -Recurse

Well, to not arbitrarily delete root / OS/boot drive stuff, I'd consider a small change.

$Folder = Read-Host -Prompt 'Enter the full path to the target folder tree to delete'
If ($Folder -match 'C:')
{
    Write-Warning -Message "You are making a distructive action on the $Folder. Are you sure you want to do this?"

<#
    #Delete files older than 6 months
    Get-ChildItem $Folder -Recurse -Force -ea 0 |
    ? {!$_.PsIsContainer -and $_.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-180)} |
    ForEach-Object {
       $_ | del -Force
       $_.FullName | Out-File C:\log\deletedlog.txt -Append
    }
#>
}
Else
{
    "Working on deleting the folder tree $Folder"
<#
    #Delete empty folders and subfolders
    Get-ChildItem $Folder -Recurse -Force -ea 0 |
    ? {$_.PsIsContainer -eq $True} |
    ? {$_.getfiles().count -eq 0} |
    ForEach-Object {
        $_ | del -Force
        $_.FullName | Out-File C:\log\deletedlog.txt -Append
    }
#>
}

I wrote a function for just this purpose a few years ago, also has the option to clean up empty folders.