You can use the following syntax in PowerShell to delete all files in a directory whose name matches a certain pattern:
Get-ChildItem $Path | Where{$_.Name -Match "new"} | Remove-Item
This particular example deletes all files in the current directory that contain the string “new” somewhere in the file name.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Related: How to Delete All Files with Specific Extension in PowerShell
Example: How to Delete All Files Matching a Certain Pattern Using PowerShell
Suppose that our current directory has the following path:
- C:\Users\bobbi\OneDrive\Documents\test_data
We can type Dir to list out all files in this current directory:
We can see that there are four files in this directory:
- my_data.txt
- my_newest_data.txt
- new_data.txt
- some_old_data.txt
Suppose that we would like to delete all files that contain “new” in the file name.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
Get-ChildItem $Path | Where{$_.Name -Match "new"} | Remove-Item
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
We can see that we were able to successfully delete the two files in the directory that contained “new” somewhere in the file name:
- my_newest_data.txt
- new_data.txt
When we ran the Dir command again, we could see that the two files without “new” in the name were left untouched.
Note: The Match statement in PowerShell is case-sensitive. For example, if we instead searched for “NEW” then the two files with “new” in the file name would still have been deleted.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to Replace Every Occurrence of String in File
PowerShell: How to Replace Text with Wildcard
PowerShell: How to Replace Special Characters in String
