If you were a systems admin in the early days of DOS and Windows, you may remember the deltree command was able to delete a directory and all files and directories below that point of the tree, hence the name.

You may also notice that deltree doesn’t exist anymore in modern Windows operating systems, even though it would be a nice tool still. Deltree never got updated from the 16-bit era and only works on 16-bit or 32-bit versions of Windows.

You are not totally out of luck though as Windows does include two other ways to do almost the same command, even though it is not as quick as typing “deltree foldername”.

Using the command prompt, you can run the remove directory command adding the “/s”, recursive and “/q”, quiet commands.
c:\> rd /s /q c:\directory

Or in PowerShell, you can run the following.
PS C:\> powershell -Command “Remove-Item ‘PathToDirectory\*’ -Recurse -Force”

Or if you are feeling really adventurous, you can download an remake from Raymond Chi at his Github!

https://github.com/ai7/toolbox/tree/master/deltree

At the very least, it is fun to go see some old DOS 6.22 screenshots of how it worked in the “old days”! 🙂