How to avoid Remove-Item PowerShell errors "process cannot access the file"?

Question

We are using TfsDeployer and PowerShell script to remove the folders using Remove-Item before deployment of a new version. Sometimes the PS script fails with the error:

Remove-Item : Cannot remove item Services\bin: The process cannot access the file Services\bin' because it is being used by another proc Get-ChildItem -Path $Destination -Recurse | Remove-Item <<<< -force -recurse + CategoryInfo : WriteError: (C:\Program File..\Services\bin:DirectoryInfo) [Remove-Item], IOException FullyQualifiedErrorId : RemoveFileSystemItemIOError,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.RemoveItemCommand

I’ve tried to follow the answer (from: Force-remove files and directories in PowerShell fails sometimes, but not always) to pipe Get-ChildItem -Recurse into Remove-Item.

Get-ChildItem * -Include *.csv -Recurse | Remove-Item

But the error still happens periodically. We are using unlocker to manually kill the locking application, (it’s usually w3wp), but I prefer to find automated solution.

Another (not ideal) option is to-suppress-powershell-errors

 Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Any suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

Late, but someone might find this useful.

In an automation script, I recurse through processes to find any that is using the path of the directory I want to delete, and kill them.

Sometimes other apps might be locking a file, so I used process explorer to find handle/dll. If is ok to kill the app, I add the kill to the script.

Then remove the dir.

        get-process | foreach{
          $pName = $_
          if ( $pName.Path -like ( $INSTALL_PATH + '*') ) {
            Stop-Process $pName.id -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
          }
        }
       Remove-Item  -Force -Recurse $INSTALL_PATH

Answer 2

You could inspect the errors given by the Remove-Item cmdlet. Use the ErrorVariable parameter on Remove-Item to store its errors in a variable, then loop through it, only displaying the errors you want, like this:

Get-ChildItem * -Include *.csv -recurse | ForEach-Object {
    $removeErrors = @()
    $_ | Remove-Item -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -ErrorVariable removeErrors
    $removeErrors | where-object { $_.Exception.Message -notlike '*it is being used by another process*' }
}

Answer 3

Well as it's a web application that's locking the file, why don't you do an iisreset /stop before removing the item, and then iisreset /start afterwards?