I want to delete all bin and obj folders to force all projects to rebuild everything

Question

I work with multiple projects, and I want to recursively delete all folders with the name \'bin\' or \'obj\' that way I am sure that all projects will rebuild everything (so

Answer 1

I wrote a powershell script to do it.

The advantage is that it prints out a summary of deleted folders, and ignored ones if you specified any subfolder hierarchy to be ignored.

Answer 2

Something like that should do it in a pretty elegant way, after clean target:

<Target Name="RemoveObjAndBin" AfterTargets="Clean">
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)" />
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(TargetDir)" />
</Target>

Answer 3

I found this thread and got bingo. A little more searching turned up this power shell script:

Get-ChildItem .\ -include bin,obj -Recurse | ForEach-Object ($_) { Remove-Item $_.FullName -Force -Recurse }

I thought I'd share, considering that I did not find the answer when I was looking here.

Answer 4

I use to always add a new target on my solutions for achieving this.

<Target Name="clean_folders">
  <RemoveDir Directories=".\ProjectName\bin" />
  <RemoveDir Directories=".\ProjectName\obj" />
  <RemoveDir Directories="$(ProjectVarName)\bin" />
  <RemoveDir Directories="$(ProjectVarName)\obj" />
</Target>

And you can call it from command line

msbuild /t:clean_folders

This can be your batch file.

msbuild /t:clean_folders
PAUSE

Answer 5

This is my batch file that I use for deleting all BIN and OBJ folders recursively.

1. Create an empty file and name it DeleteBinObjFolders.bat
2. Copy-paste code the below code into the DeleteBinObjFolders.bat
3. Move the DeleteBinObjFolders.bat file in the same folder with your solution (*.sln) file.

@echo off
@echo Deleting all BIN and OBJ folders...
for /d /r . %%d in (bin,obj) do @if exist "%%d" rd /s/q "%%d"
@echo BIN and OBJ folders successfully deleted :) Close the window.
pause > nul

Answer 6

Have a look at the CleanProject, it will delete bin folders, obj folders, TestResults folders and Resharper folders. The source code is also available.