I use a symbol store on a network drive to collect debug symbols for our application. The symbols are used while debugging a crash dump file that has been loaded into Visual Studio. I have Powershell scripts in place that manage deleting ‘old’ versions of symbols. Or, so, I thought. Recently, while working on another script, I noticed that using symstore to delete symbols doesn’t actually delete anything. When I use symstore to delete symbols I see a “0000000161.deleted” file in 000Admin folder for example. This file contains entries for the associated debug symbols. It contains entries like:
"Aggregat.pdb\B4E7044117F0469CB321E9FA9003E4CA5","C:\temp\pdbs\1823\Aggregat.pdb"
The first entry above is the folder for the associated debug symbols for the ‘Aggregat’ module. I would expect that when I delete symbols using the transaction ID, that the corresponding folders (ie. B4E7044117F0469CB321E9FA9003E4CA5) would also be removed. It appears like that’s not the case.
Is my assumption correct? Am I responsible for the full cleanup of the symbols store structure?