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PowerShell: How to delete a file based on a list of computers?

Posted by Ivan

/ January 31, 2010 / 12 Comments

The following PowerShell script recipe will help you delete a remote file based on a list of computers stored in a text file. New PowerShell function will be created during the session which will be piped from the text file.

Create new file named C:\Scripts\Active_Computers.txt and populate the computer names.

function delete-remotefile {
    PROCESS {
                $file = "\\$_\c$\install.exe"
                if (test-path $file)
                {
                echo "$_ install.exe exists"
                Remove-Item $file -force
                echo "$_ install.exe file deleted"
                }
            }
}

Get-Content  C:\Scripts\Active_Computers.txt | delete-remotefile

That’s it.

December 21, 2011
Ram

Thanks!!! This worked out for me
January 5, 2012
Tom

Thanks Ram. How would you go about deleting specific file types. For example: I want to delete all .pst files from a list of computers.
January 18, 2012
Brian Cassidy

How could I change this script to delete a list of files (list.txt)?
February 4, 2012
Paul Edwards

Can this be used to delete PST files, if so on what OS XP and Windows 7
March 20, 2012
Amit

Hii
I would like to know if the aboe script would work for computers which are password protected because I have around 400 machines in the domain and I wanted to delete some log file and txt file from all the computers
Thanks
Amit
August 23, 2012
carlos porras

Id doesn’t work for me.

I have a folder named: C:\scripts\master2
it has inside
clean2.ps1
computers.txt

I run the script on the same computer and i get:
PS C:\scripts\master2> .\clean2.ps1
Get-Content : Cannot find path ‘C:\scripts\master2\computers.txt’ because it does not exist.
At C:\scripts\master2\clean2.ps1:13 char:12
+ Get-Content <<<

any advice?
April 8, 2016
Sven

Great script. Thanks. You just saved me a few hours of my life.
January 15, 2017
sysadmin

New to powershell – Thanks! This saved me a lot of time. Appreciate it!
March 14, 2018
Sumit

Brilliant!
July 2, 2019
ATX

This worked great. I medified it to use wildcard for logs and it saves so much time.

Thanks!
July 2, 2019
ATX

This worked great. I modified it to use wildcard for logs and it saves so much time.

I will call if from my stop script tp dp the cleanup once systems are stopped.

Thanks!
April 27, 2020
Laiq

Thank you sir!

Could i take it one step further and ask how can we delete temp files for all users on any given machine that are active for last 60 days ?

Please and Thank you!