You can use the following syntax in PowerShell to keep X number of files in a particular directory and delete the rest:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | Sort CreationTime -desc | Select -skip 5 | Remove-Item -Force
This particular example will keep the 5 most recently created files in the current directory and delete all other files.
Here is what the various commands do:
- Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File: Recursively retrieve all files in current directory and subfolders
- Sort CreationTime -desc: Sort files from newest to oldest based on creation date
- Select -skip 5: Select all files except the first 5
- Remove-Item -Force: Delete selected files, using -Force to include read-only and hidden files
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Keep X Number of Files and Delete the Rest in PowerShell
Suppose that our current directory has the following path:
- C:\Users\bobbi\data6
We can type Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File to list out all files in this current directory:
We can see that there are 7 total files in this current directory.
Suppose that we we would like to only keep the 5 most recently created files and delete the rest.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | Sort CreationTime -desc | Select -skip 5 | Remove-Item -Force
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that when we use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet again to view all of the files in the current directory that only the 5 most recently created files are left.
All other files have been deleted.
Note: Feel free to change the value 5 after the -skip command to keep a different number of files instead.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in PowerShell:
PowerShell: How to Delete All Files with Specific Extension
PowerShell: How to Rename File Extension of Multiple Files
PowerShell: How to List All Files in Directory to Text File
