If you want to empty the Windows Recycle bin automatically, you can use PowerShell. In this post, I’ll show you how.

I also demonstrate everything mentioned here in this video on YouTube.

Why though?

I don’t claim that using PowerShell to empty the Recycle Bin is generally better than using the GUI. But with PowerShell you can automate it. For example as part of a custom system clean-up script.

Note: Works only on Windows

The code shown in this post only works on Windows.

Empty Recycle Bin of the current user

The following code empties the Recycle Bin of the current user:

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Clear-RecycleBin

Optionally, you can add the -Force parameter to prevent additional confirmation prompts:

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Clear-RecycleBin -Force

If you have multiple volumes on your computer, you might want to empty only the Recycle Bin of a specific drive:

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Clear-RecycleBin -DriveLetter E -Force

Empty Recycle Bin of all users

Sadly the native Clear-RecycleBin cmdlet only empty the Recycle Bin of the current user. If you want to empty the Recycle Bins of all users on the system you need to work with the file system.

In case you didn’t know: The Recycle Bin is stored in a folder called $Recycle.Bin which is stored on the root of the drive (one for each volume). Since the dollar symbol gets interpreted as a sign for a variable, we have to use the ' single quotes, instead of " double quotes for the path.

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Remove-Item 'C:\$Recycle.Bin' -Force -Recurse

And if you have other volumes, you can either empty the Recycle Bins with a hard coded path like this:

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Remove-Item 'E:\$Recycle.Bin' -Force -Recurse

Or do something automatic for all volumes by using the PowerShell pipeline to combine a few cmdlets, for example I came up with this snippet:

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Get-Volume | 
    Where-Object {$_.DriveLetter -and $_.DriveType -ne "CD-ROM"} | 
    ForEach-Object { Remove-Item "$($_.DriveLetter):\`$Recycle.Bin -Force -Recurse }