How to delete all files in a certain folder

Question

I'm trying to make a feature in my program to delete all files in the Windows temporary folder "(C:\Users\Owner\AppData\Local\Temp)", how would I do this?

user_65863 · Answer

Call the Win32 API GetTempPath() function to get the user's %TEMP% folder path, then you can either:

call FindFirstFile()/FindNextFile() in a loop, calling DeleteFile() on each iteration.
call SHFileOperation(), specifying FO_DELETE with a *.* wildcard.
use a loop to discover the files, calling IFileOperation::DeleteItem() to mark each one for deletion, and then call IFileOperation::PerformOperations() to actually delete them.

If you want a pure C++ solution, and are using C++17 or later, then you can use std::filesystem::temp_directory_path(), using std::filesystem::directory_iterator and std::filesystem::remove() in a loop, or just std::filesystem::remove_all() by itself.

How to delete all files in a certain folder

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