Supposedly

del /f/s/q [target]

will delete an entire folder in Windows.

But often it doesn’t – excessively long file names, excessively long paths, and other things, break it. Sometimes it can be quite difficult to fully clean out a folder.

There are many solutions (cygwin‘s rm is pretty powerful) but here’s a simple batch file that harnesses the power of Robocopy (which comes pre-installed with Windows) to do the job:

@rem thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/97875/rm-rf-equivalent-for-windows
@echo TEP - Terminate with Extreme Prejudice (die, die, die)
@echo off
setlocal
SET /P AREYOUSURE=Are you ABSOLUTELY SURE you want to irreversibly delete folder '%1' [y,N]? 
IF /I "%AREYOUSURE%" NEQ "Y" GOTO abort
set emptyFolder=%TEMP%\tep_%RANDOM%%RANDOM%%RANDOM%
mkdir %emptyFolder%
@REM robocopy will mirror an EMPTY FOLDER into the target
robocopy /mir %emptyFolder% %1
rmdir %emptyFolder%
rmdir %1
goto exit
:abort
echo Nothing done.
:exit
endlocal

The only thing I’ve found that this won’t delete is open files.