xdel - command line hardlinks

Last Updated September 20th 2008, Version 5.1.0

Introduction

The NTFS filesystem of NT4/W2K/WXP supports the junction functionality. Deleting subdirectories recursivley can be done by various of tools, but only xdel is aware of junctions, and instead of crawling recursivley down a junction, xdel simply unlinks the junction, and so does no harm to contents chained into a hierarchy via junctions.

Furthermore xdel.exe properly deletes very long pathnames with more than 256 characters.

Installation

copy xdel.exe to some directory referenced by your PATH environment variable. %systemroot% is a good place.

Using xdel

xdel.exe is a typical command line utility.

Recursive support	Recursivly delete directory hierarchies. e.g.: xdel x:\dir\dir2 In the above example the directories and files below x:\dir\dir2 are deleted. .

Limitations

xdel.exe can only be used with NT4/W2K/WXP.

History

September 20th 2008	Version 5.10 released. Available for X64 and Itanium. Support for very long path names
November 12th 2006	Version 4.10 released. Released on website.
February 18th 1999	Version 4.0 Rewrote in C++
1990	Version 1.0 Wrote it in assembly language

Status

The 5.1 version is stable enough to satisfy most needs. Currently no development activity on this utility.

Open Issues

Maybe bugs?
Feature requests?

Links

See Link Shell Extension, to comfortably create NTFS junctions.

License

This program is provided as is. See license.txt from this distribution for legal issues.

Contact / Donations

Bug reports, or feature requests send to Hermann Schinagl..

xdel.exe is and will be freeware, but if xdel.exe was really helpful for you and saved lots of your time please think of donations either via PayPal

or by sending me a gift certificate from

Download

Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows Server 2003 Windows Vista	Please make sure that the necessary runtime .dlls are installed on your system. This prerequisites package can be downloaded from Microsoft: vcredist_x86.exe for Vs2005 Sp1 (2.6 MB) Afterwards install the xdel.zip (13KB)

Vista64 Windows XP64	Please make sure that the necessary runtime .dlls are installed on your system. This prerequisites package can be downloaded from Microsoft: vcredist_x64.exe for Vs2005 Sp1 (3.1 MB) Afterwards install the xdel64.zip (14KB)
Windows Itanium	Please make sure that the necessary runtime .dlls are installed on your system. This prerequisites package can be downloaded from Microsoft: vcredist_IA64.exe for Vs2005 Sp1 (6.1 mb) Afterwards install the xdelItanium.zip (19KB)