Question

I’m having some major trouble deleting directories. I’m working building a ADMIN tool to delete directories that my clients create but then ask to delete them. You would think this is simple:

using (var context = Impersonator.LogOn(user, password, domain))
{
    try
    {
        dir = new DirectoryInfo(path);
        dir.Delete(true);
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        return string.Format("Error:{0}", ex.Message);
    }
    finally
    {
        context.Undo();
    }
}

Now no matter what I do I can’t delete the folder. response is alway “Access to the path is denied”. I’ve doubled check the path, the login everything.

Please tell me what I’m doing wrong.

Server: win2008 web edition
ASP.NET: 4

Answer 1

I recently solved this identical problem by first deleting all the files in the folder, then deleting the folder.

To me, the error message about access was misleading.

Sometimes I also encounter this when deleting files in Windows Explorer. Once in a while, it balks at deleting the directory until you delete the files in it. I have never figured out why.

Here’s my code:

private static void FileCleanup(string directoryName)
{
    try
    {
        string[] filenames = Directory.GetFiles(directoryName);

        foreach (string filename in filenames)
        {
            File.Delete(filename);
        }

        if (Directory.Exists(directoryName))
        {
            Directory.Delete(directoryName);
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
       // you might want to log it, or swallow any exceptions here
    }
}