Need to find a way to programmatically delete undeleteable empty folders

Question

I've got a large folder on an offsite backup machine that gets populated with files by rsync (through deltacopy) every night (running windows xp) from the main work site. I've discovered some annoying folders that cannot be opened, or deleted, or even checked for file sizes. I get the such and such a folder is not accessible, access is denied message when i try to click on it in windows explorer. According to the windows explorer tooltip they are also "empty" and the properties of these folders say 0 bytes and 0 files.

I currently have a c# program that goes through every folder and file and tries to copy the whole backup directory to a dated backup-backup directory, which is how i discovered this problem in the first place. The regular System.IO library seems helpless against these blasted folders. Exceptions are thrown when I even try to access the folder path.

Does anyone have any clue how I could, say, on an access denied exception in my existing copy code, force the delete of these folders so rysnc can recreate the directory again and get the whole thing synced again?

Answer 1

Yes, try the awesome "Process Explorer" from Microsoft (formerly SysInternals).

Although it's for the processes in the windows filesystem, you could search for your folder in the explorer window & it will tell you who is locking it.

Once you release the process, your program would be able to delete the folder.

If that doesn't work, see if you can specify additional parameters to bruteforce the delete in your program.

Answer 2

First thing I think of when I see this is time to do a checkdisk. From the sounds of it, it feels more like a file system problem than something solvable the way you want to go about it.

Answer 3

It sounds like the filenames are either bad or contain characters that are invalid in Win32. Did you try to delete the directories with rd /r? Did you do a dir /x on them and try to delete the files/directories using their short names?

I would say that you first have to figure out why you can't delete the folders. Once you figure that out, you can write a program to fix it.

OK, so now that you know it's a permissions problem, the first step is to take ownership of the files (so you can set the permissions), then change the permissions so that you can delete the files.

Here's code to take ownership of a file:

WindowsIdentity currentUser = System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent(); 

FileSecurity acl = File.GetAccessControl(filename); 
acl.SetOwner(currentUser.User); 

File.SetAccessControl(filename, security);