In an earlier post, “What Happens When You Do File.Delete For A Non-Existent File In C# & .NET”, I mentioned working on a utility that generated and processed some files.

Towards the end there was some housekeeping where I needed to delete the generated files, as well as the directory that they were in.

The code was straightforward enough.

// Get the files to process
var files = Directory.GetFiles(rootFolder);

//
// Processing takes place here
//

// Delete the files
Parallel.ForEach(files, file =>
{
  File.Delete(file);
});

// Delete the folder
Directory.Delete(rootFolder);

At first glance, simple enough.

Until you realize there is no reason to delete the files first, and then the folder.

You can delete the folder directly, and its files will go with it.

Like so:

Directory.Delete(rootFolder);

And we’re done.

Not so fast! Directory.Delete will throw an exception if the directory is not empty!

Luckily there is an overload for this:

Directory.Delete(rootfolder, true)

This accepts a flag that tells the runtime to do a recursive deletion of the contents of the folder.

Our code now is like so:

// Get the files to process
var files = Directory.GetFiles(rootFolder);

//
// Processing takes place here
//

// Delete the folder and it's contents
Directory.Delete(rootFolder);

If, however, you needed some sort of log or indication of the individual deleted files activity, you might want to use my initial approach.

TLDR

You can use the overload for Directory.Delete that recursively deletes its contents to avoid having to delete the files first.

Happy hacking!