How to Delete All Files with Extension in PowerShell

To delete all files with a specific extension in PowerShell, you can use the Get-ChildItem and Remove-Item cmdlets.

The following method can be used to delete all files with a specific extension in a directory using PowerShell.

Method 1: Delete all files with a specific extension using PowerShell

Get-ChildItem -Path $directoryPath -Filter "*.txt" | Remove-Item

This example retrieves files in the specified directory $directoryPath with a specified extension (.txt) and pipes them to the Remove-Item cmdlet, which deletes each file.

Method 2: Delete all files with extension recursively using PowerShell

Get-ChildItem -Path $directoryPath -Filter "*.csv"  -Recurse| Remove-Item

In this example, the Get-ChildItem recursively retrieved all files with an extension (.csv) and pipes to the Remove-Item cmdlet to delete each of them.

The following example shows how to use these methods.

Delete All Files with a Specific Extension Using PowerShell

Use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet in PowerShell to retrieve files with a specific extension (.txt) and pass it as input to the Remove-Item cmdlet to remove each file.

# Specify the directory path
$directoryPath = "C:\temp\log\"

# Retrieve *.txt files and delete each file
Get-ChildItem -Path $directoryPath -Filter "*.txt" | Remove-Item

After running the above PowerShell script, it retrieves all files from the specified folder $directoryPath with .txt extension and pipes it to the Remove-Item cmdlet. The Remove-Item command deletes each file.

Delete All Files with Extension Recursively Using PowerShell

To delete all files with extension recursively, use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet along with the -Recurse parameter to retrieve all files from folders and subfolders and pipe it to the Remove-Item command to delete all files.

The following example shows how to do it with syntax.

# Specify the directory path
$directoryPath = "C:\temp\log\"

# Retrieve all files recursively with .csv extension
Get-ChildItem -Path $directoryPath -Filter "*.csv" -Recurse

# Retrieve all files recursively with .csv extension and remove it
Get-ChildItem -Path $directoryPath -Filter "*.csv" -Recurse | Remove-Item

# Retrieve all files recursively with .csv extension
Get-ChildItem -Path $directoryPath -Filter "*.csv" -Recurse

The output of the above PowerShell script deletes all files with a specific extension (.csv) from the specified folder $directoryPath.

It removes all the files with an extension (.csv) from folders and subfolders.

Conclusion

I hope the above article on deleting all files with an extension using PowerShell is helpful to you.

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