How to create or delete directories from Windows Powershell

Table of contents

• Introduction
• How to create a new directory in windows powershell
  • new-item command
  • ni command
• How to delete the directories from the Windows powershell
• Conclusion

Introduction

In this article we will cover the steps to use to create or delete a directory directly from the windows powershell. We will also see the alias associated with those commands so that we can use it for doing the same action 

How to create a new directory in windows powershell 

In this section we will cover the creation of  new directories from powershell using the new-item command and its alias ni command 

new-item command 

Using the new-item command we can create both the files and the directories , By default without any options it creates a file. If used with the  option “-itemtype directory” it creates the directory

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> new-item -itemtype directory test-directory

    Directory: C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems

Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                -------------         ------ ----
d-----         7/6/2023   6:55 AM                test-directory

ni command 

Similarly we can create a directory using the ni command as it is the alias for the new-item command. Note that we need to use the same option “ -itemtype directory “ to create the directories as without any options it creates the files 

Get-alias command helps us with identifying the alias associated with the various powershell commands

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> get-alias -name ni

CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Alias           ni -> New-Item

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> ni -itemtype directory test-directory-2

    Directory: C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems

Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                -------------         ------ ----
d-----         7/6/2023   6:57 AM                test-directory-2

How to delete the directories from the Windows powershell 

In this section we will cover how to delete the directories from the powershell using the remove-item command and its alias del command 

Get-alias command helps us with identifying the alias associated with the various powershell commands. We can see that the 3 aliases like rm , rmdir , del are mapped to the same command remove-item . we can use any of them to do the same action

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> Get-Alias -name rm

CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Alias           rm -> Remove-Item

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> Get-Alias -name rmdir

CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Alias           rmdir -> Remove-Item

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> Get-Alias -name del

CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Alias           del -> Remove-Item

In the following example , we have deleted both the directories created in the earlier section using the del and remove-item commands . Please note that it got deleted without any errors as they were empty directories 

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> del .\test-directory\
PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> remove-item .\test-directory-2\
PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> ls

    Directory: C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems

Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                -------------         ------ ----
-a----        6/27/2023   7:52 AM             36 test1.txt

Let’s say we have some files under those directories , then we will see a prompt asking to confirm whether we want to remove all the files under that recursively  , then we can select option yes by typing “y” and it should delete them all 

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> remove-item .\test-directory-2\

Confirm
The item at C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems\test-directory-2\ has children and the Recurse parameter was not
specified. If you continue, all children will be removed with the item. Are you sure you want to continue?
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "Y"):

If you would like to delete the directories and the files recursively without seeing the prompt , we can  use the recurse option along with the remove-item command 

PS C:\Users\Public\Discovering-systems> rm .\test-directory-2\ -recurse

Conclusion

In this article we were able to explore the ways in which we can use the powershell to create , or delete directories 

If you are interested in more windows powershell related articles from us , please go through the following articles  

How to use windows Powershell and command prompt to SSH into devices 

How to use windows command prompt and powershell for SCP file transfer

How to do Packet capture on remote machine over ssh from Windows and linux machine 

How to create, delete or list the files from Windows Powershell