Deleting 400,000 files

[Paddy]

Well it's at least 400,000 because that's where I got bored with watching the folder properties count up. So who knows? It may be millions.

This is on a Windows 2003 server. The SMTP server has a badmail folder, which I'm guessing is where a couple of years worth of spam has been accumulating. This is what I'm trying to clear out.

If I try to select the folder with Explorer, then it just dies. If I right click and choose delete, it says "preparing to delete" until I get bored and cancelled it. And I'm currently running delete *.* in a command prompt, but that's having a good long think too and doesn't seem to be doing anything.

Is there any sensible way I can delete a folder and not worry about the contents?

This is a remote server I can only access via remote desktop. Part of the problem is if I just leave it doing something, the RDP session times out and kills the processes.

Use MS tools / robocopy
Make and empty directory(folder) eg: c:\mtdir
mirror the empty directory to the full one
use "/purge" option
have a coffee and come back, all done!

eg: robocopy c:\mtdir c:\fulldir /purge

[xoggoth]

Waits for "How can I recover 40,000 files I deleted by mistake" thread.

[Paddy]

Waits for "How can I recover 40,000 files I deleted by mistake" thread.

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