Node.js – Remove directory which is not empty

filesystemsnode.js

In my Node application I need to remove a directory which has some files, but fs.rmdir only works on empty directories. How can I do this?

Best Solution

As of 2019...

As of Node.js 12.10.0, fs.rmdirSync supports a recursive options, so you can finally do:

fs.rmdirSync(dir, { recursive: true });

Where the recursive option deletes the entire directory recursively.

Update: The recursive option in fs.rmdir / fs.rmdirSync has been deprecated however, so use fs.rm / fs.rmSync instead:

fs.rmSync(dir, { recursive: true, force: true });

The force: true option ignores exceptions if dir does not exist. More info see the fs.rmSync docs

FAT32:

Maximum number of files: 268,173,300
Maximum number of files per directory: 2¹⁶ - 1 (65,535)
Maximum file size: 2 GiB - 1 without LFS, 4 GiB - 1 with

NTFS:

Maximum number of files: 2³² - 1 (4,294,967,295)
Maximum file size
- Implementation: 2⁴⁴ - 2⁶ bytes (16 TiB - 64 KiB)
- Theoretical: 2⁶⁴ - 2⁶ bytes (16 EiB - 64 KiB)
Maximum volume size
- Implementation: 2³² - 1 clusters (256 TiB - 64 KiB)
- Theoretical: 2⁶⁴ - 1 clusters (1 YiB - 64 KiB)

ext2:

Maximum number of files: 10¹⁸
Maximum number of files per directory: ~1.3 × 10²⁰ (performance issues past 10,000)
Maximum file size
- 16 GiB (block size of 1 KiB)
- 256 GiB (block size of 2 KiB)
- 2 TiB (block size of 4 KiB)
- 2 TiB (block size of 8 KiB)
Maximum volume size
- 4 TiB (block size of 1 KiB)
- 8 TiB (block size of 2 KiB)
- 16 TiB (block size of 4 KiB)
- 32 TiB (block size of 8 KiB)

ext3:

Maximum number of files: min(volumeSize / 2¹³, numberOfBlocks)
Maximum file size: same as ext2
Maximum volume size: same as ext2

ext4:

Maximum number of files: 2³² - 1 (4,294,967,295)
Maximum number of files per directory: unlimited
Maximum file size: 2⁴⁴ - 1 bytes (16 TiB - 1)
Maximum volume size: 2⁴⁸ - 1 bytes (256 TiB - 1)

Windows – How to recursively delete an entire directory with PowerShell 2.0

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force some_dir

does indeed work as advertised here.

rm -r -fo some_dir

are shorthand aliases that work too.

As far as I understood it, the -Recurse parameter just doesn't work correctly when you try deleting a filtered set of files recursively. For killing a single dir and everything below it seems to work fine.