One of the most annoying problem in windows: You can see in windows shared folders, having a lot of files that cannot be deleted. When we try to delete the files, we get this, “Error Deleting File or Folder – Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk“.
I used to see this in my shared drive but was unable to delete it till now. Thanks to Varun , my colleague, who is my favorite, as he brings up strange issues, which i have never seen! This windows issue is an exception.
He used to hunt me till i solve this. But since he bugged me a lot, i finally decided to search for a way to delete this.
And yes, i found it. These folders are created, because of a MAC. When a MAC user access these folders, Macs write all sorts of meta data to extra “._DSStore” files and suchlike and had left this file behind. So to delete these files/folders you can use a simple DOS command:

del "\\?\C:\Temp\test\file_you_want_to_delete"

If you want to delete a folder, use the following:
rd /s "\\?\D:\Annoying Folder."

Using this command, i managed to delete Varun’s folder, which was annoying him, and me too!
Thanks once again Varun.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!