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Discussion on: How to delete ALL node_modules folders on your machine and free up HD space!

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gnuchu profile image
John Griffiths

The windows version will take a while as it looks at every file. If you just want to blast it, using robocopy is a good solution.

$ robocopy c:/someemptydir c:/path-to-node_modules /MIR > NUL

This method also gets you round the windows long file name problem that you often come across here.

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markpieszak profile image
Mark Pieszak

Won’t this delete everything, and not just the node_modules themselves ? I’ll have to give it a try ! I saw someone else post this as well:

robocopy EMPTY_FOLDER node_modules /mir

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gnuchu profile image
John Griffiths

It’ll delete everything under the destination path. Syntax is:

Robocopy <source> <destination> /MIR

With a redirect to null to remove output.

I’m not a node dev but devops who has to regularly remove these things from build slaves. Obviously there’s a cost on next build re-downloading.