this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Windows has
rmdir?Uh... kinda? Powershell has many POSIX aliases to cmdlets (equivalent to shell built-ins) of allegedly the same functionality.
rmdirandrmare both aliases ofRemove-Item,lsisGet-ChildItem,cdisSet-Location,catisGet-Content, and so on.Of particular note is
curl. Windows supplies the real CURL executable (System32/curl.exe), but in a Powershell 5 session, which is still the default on Windows 11 25H2, thecurlalias shadows it.curlis an alias of theInvoke-WebRequestcmdlet, which is functionally a headless front-end for Internet Explorer unless the-UseBasicParsingswitch is specified. But since IE is dead, if-UseBasicParsingis not specified, the cmdlet will always throw an error. Fucking genius, Microsoft.That's hilarious
Jesus, They really just need to start over.
Yeah as an admin I love that I can run familiar Linuxy commands in powershell but I also hate that they can't just use/fork the real userland utilities so everything works just similarly enough to completely throw you off when you stumble across a difference
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/rmdir
Apparently.
Wait, what do people use other than rmdir?
Windows explorer
I don't have a Windows computer on hand, but I think
delworks on directories? I'm going by very old memories hereDel is files, Rmdir is directories.
Running del on folders just leaves an empty tree.
"rd" and "rmdir" only work on empty directories in MS-DOS (and I assume, by extension, in Windows shell). "deltree" is for nuking a complete tree including files, as the name suggests.
In the original Reddit post it's mentioned that the agent ran "rmdir /s" which does in fact work on directories containing files and/or subdirectories.
"rmdir /s" - /s for sarcasm
"Where the fuck is all my data?"