PowerShell Remove Junction

powershell junction
Mastacheata picture Mastacheata · May 19, 2017 · Viewed 12.6k times · Source

As of Windows 10 PowerShell is finally capable of creating Junctions and links natively.

Howerver the Remove-Item function seems to be unaware of the junction and tries to remove the directory asking for confirmation and if it should recursively delete items within.

So, the question is: Is there a way to remove a junction using PowerShell native Cmdlets? (i.e. without calling cmd)

Answer

Matt picture Matt · May 19, 2017

Is there a way to remove a junction using PowerShell?

Currently, at least in PowerShell v5, this is considered "fixed". What you can do is use the -Force switch, else you will get an error calling the path an NTFS junction. The reason that I at least use the quotes on fixed is that using the switch will still make the message about children in the directory show up. Selecting Y will still only delete the junction in my testing using PSv5.

Remove-Item "C:\temp\junction" -Force -Confirm:$False

If that doesn't work for you or you don't have v5 you can use the .Net method to delete a directory. This appears to work correctly as well. 

[io.directory]::Delete("C:\temp\junction")

Related questions

powershell to resolve junction target path

In PowerShell, I need resolve the target path of a junction (symlink). for example, say I have a junction c:\someJunction whose target is c:\temp\target I tried variations of $junc = Get-Item c:\someJunction, but was only able to …

Read More
Powershell Remove Symbolic Link Windows

I am having issues when removing SymbolicLinks which I have created with New-Item: New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path C:\SPI -Target "C:\Users\Chino\Dropbox (Reserve Membership)\" I need to modify the link because it has the wrong -Target, which should …

Read More
Determine installed PowerShell version

How can I determine what version of PowerShell is installed on a computer, and indeed if it is installed at all?

Read More