DELETE USERS FILES FROM USER PROFILE BY GPO

Copper Contributor

hello ,

in my  organization i need to delete all user's profiles files.

i tried to it by gpo with the cmd script::del /f d:\user\%USERNAME%\documents\*.*
del /f d:\user\%USERNAME%\Videos\*.*
del /f d:\user\%USERNAME%Pictures\*.*
del /f d:\user\%USERNAME%\Music\*.*
del /f d:\user\%USERNAME%\Desktop\*.*
del /f d:\user\%USERNAME%\Downloads\*.*

unfortunatly its not working.

do you have another way to do so ?

thanks.

 

7 Replies

@eyalmargani You need to specify /q along with /f.  I have tested the following and it works fine.  Make sure your paths are correct, and the GPO is under User Configuration.

 

del /q /f /s %userprofile%\downloads\*

 

 

tnx for the answer .
does the specific user have an admin permissions?

For my test no, the user was not an admin.

i write the following script :
del /q /f /s d:\user\%userprofile%\documents\*
del /q /f /s d:\user\%userprofile%\Videos\*
del /q /f /s d:\user\%userprofile%\Pictures\*
del /q /f /s d:\user\%userprofile%\Music\*
del /q /f /s d:\user\%userprofile%\Desktop\*
del /q /f /s d:\user\%userprofile%\Downloads\*

as i wrote before the user profile folder is at drive d.
it stil doesnt work.
any ideas?

@eyalmargani %userprofile% is an environment variable and is the same as the user's profile path such as C:\users\eyalmargani\.  You want either %userprofile%\Documents or what you had previously D:\users\%username%\documents\.  You can open a cmd prompt and echo %userprofile%, and %username% to see what you get.

@eyalmargani I would also recommend with any script you write to have a log of sorts when it isn't ran interactively.  Something as simple as the below will go a long way.  I also prefer to use powershell...

 

 

 

set "log=C:\users\public\delete-files.log"

del /q /f /s %userprofile%\documents\*

if %errorlevel% equ 0 (

    (
        echo Files deleted
    )>>%log%

) else (

    (
        echo Error: %errorlevel%
    )>>%log%

)

 

 

@eyalmargani there seems to be a mistake in the paths. The %userprofile% environment variable should not be used with d:\user, as %userprofile% already contains the full path

 

 

del /q /f /s "%userprofile%\Documents\*"
del /q /f /s "%userprofile%\Videos\*"
del /q /f /s "%userprofile%\Pictures\*"
del /q /f /s "%userprofile%\Music\*"
del /q /f /s "%userprofile%\Desktop\*"
del /q /f /s "%userprofile%\Downloads\*"