PowerShell Remove Junction

Question

As of Windows 10 PowerShell is finally capable of creating Junctions and links natively.

Howerver the Remove-Item function seems to be unaware of the junction and tries to remove the directory asking for confirmation and if it should recursively delete items within.

So, the question is: Is there a way to remove a junction using PowerShell native Cmdlets? (i.e. without calling cmd)

Answer 1

Is there a way to remove a junction using PowerShell?

Currently, at least in PowerShell v5, this is considered "fixed". What you can do is use the -Force switch, else you will get an error calling the path an NTFS junction. The reason that I at least use the quotes on fixed is that using the switch will still make the message about children in the directory show up. Selecting Y will still only delete the junction in my testing using PSv5.

Remove-Item "C:\temp\junction" -Force -Confirm:$False

If that doesn't work for you or you don't have v5 you can use the .Net method to delete a directory. This appears to work correctly as well.

[io.directory]::Delete("C:\temp\junction")

Answer 2

Be careful with removing junctions.

# Check by only showing junction links: 
(Get-ChildItem . -Force -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.LinkType -eq "Junction" -and $_.Attributes -match "ReparsePoint" }) | Select FullName, LinkType, Target

# WARNING: This recursively remove all junction links
(Get-ChildItem . -Force -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.LinkType -eq "Junction" -and $_.Attributes -match "ReparsePoint" }) | Select $_.FullName | Remove-Item -Force -Recurse

Answer 3

have a try on this "command-let":

cmd /c rmdir .\Target

source:Powershell Remove-Item and symbolic links

Answer 4

I know this post is old, but for anyone looking into this in 2023, you can use the following PS cmdlet-combination to remove a junction but not its contents :

$junction = Get-Item -Path <path_to_junction>
$junction.Delete()

That path is the actual junction path, not the parent path.

This can be condensed to :

(gi <path>).Delete()

Answer 5

After search by Google for a long time, I found the answer:

function Remove-Any-File-Force ($Target) {
    if ( Test-Path -Path "$Target" ){
        & $env:SystemRoot\System32\ATTRIB.exe -S -H -R "$Target" >$null 2>$null
    } else {
        return
    }
    $TargetAttributes = (Get-Item -Path $Target -Force).Attributes.ToString()
    if ($TargetAttributes -match "ReparsePoint") {
        if ($TargetAttributes -match "Archive") {
            Remove-Item -Path "$Target" -Force
        } else {
            try {
                & $env:SystemRoot\System32\cmd.exe /c rmdir /Q "$Target" >$null 2>$null
            } catch {
                try {
                    [io.directory]::Delete("$Target")
                } catch {
                    Remove-Item -Path "$Target" -Force
                }
            }
        }    
    } else {
        if ($TargetAttributes -match "Directory") {
            Remove-Item -Path "$Target" -Force -Recurse
        } else {
            Remove-Item -Path "$Target" -Force
        }
    }
}

Answer 6

Simple command -

rm [path of file] -Force