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When making a installer (using Visual Studio Installer) I am getting rather tired of having to manually delete hundreds of individual files every time my application changes.

It boggles my mind that Visual Studio doesn't seem to let you do a recursive delete - instead insisting that every file from every subfolder is deleted in turn. For my project this means I either;

a) Have to spend hours deleting files from the filesystem view.

b) Recreate the installer project each time.

Is there something I am doing wrong? Is there a workaround people use for this stuff? Sorry if this has been posted before, cant seem to find the right keywords if it has - I certainly find it hard to believe no one else ever needs to remove folders from the filesystem.

What is the accepted best method for removing folders with lots of files?

enter image description here

edit

To be clear; This isn't a real file system. I can deleted real files of my hard disc without problems. This is Visual Studios impression of a file system. Removing the real files does not remove reference to them, and instead will just produce more errors telling me the files are missing.

darkflame
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1 Answers1

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On a Linux I'd say

rm -rf /path/to/dir/or/file

Since you're on Windows I browsed the web for an equivalent statement and found this:

RMDIR or RD:
rd /s /q

As described by Duncan Smart right here on SO: RM -rf equivalent for Windows?

Community
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ShellFish
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  • Sorry I was not clear. I was not talking about the real filesystem, but rather the virtual filesystem in visual studio. Thats not a real directory in the screenshot, but rather the "target file structure" that will result from the install of the app. If I removed the (real) source files that virtual file structure would remain, only with red underlines telling me that are all missing files. – darkflame Jun 01 '15 at 16:51
  • Do you have methods to remove such a virtual file and/or change directory? If so it's easy to recursively define it. – ShellFish Jun 02 '15 at 12:50