I can't delete a folder.
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom
here for askleo.com. And indeed I cannot delete a folder.
This happened to me a couple of weeks ago, actually, and it dawned on me that this
was a very good opportunity today to talk about not necessarily how to solve
the problem, but more the philosophical, if you will,
implications of some of the technology problems we're faced with every day.
Do they really need to be solved?
I want to be clear, I'm not looking for an answer here.
I may in fact have an answer coming up
in a couple of days in another article or video.
This, like I said, is about philosophy.
Here's the problem that I'm running into.
You can see here I have a folder that I'm just calling Frustrating Folder,
and what I want to do is delete that folder and everything in it.
Rd is the command line Remove Directory
operation, s means do it on all sub directories and everything in it.
And Q is don't ask me about every single subfolder, I want you to do them all.
And then, of course, Frustrating Folder is the name of the frustrating folder.
Here's what happens.
I get a bunch of errors on this particular folder for a number of files within it,
and in fact, there's really nothing I can do at this point.
The folder remains.
Everything that's in it that's left is still there.
Everything that could be deleted was
deleted, but everything that was not able to be deleted remains.
What do you do?
Well, in my case, I made sure that
I did not have an excessive amount of space tied up in this folder.
What's left in this folder?
In my case, I've got like 44 megabytes
of information that what's left in that folder that I can't delete is
taking up 44 megabytes on an eight terabyte drive.
Not particularly significant.
Which honestly leads me to the whole point of this video.
Some problems just aren't worth solving.
They're not.
And the reason I say this and the reason
this thought came to me on this particular example.
Is because I hear from so many people who are tearing their hair out or beating
their head against a wall or whatever metaphor you might want to choose.
Because they're trying to solve some
problem that they can't solve that ultimately.
If left unsolved.
Would have almost no impact on anything.
In other words, they're wasting a bunch
of time and energy solving something that doesn't need to be solved.
My choice for this particular directory is to leave it be.
In fact, what I do instead, and I'll show you, is I'm going to rename
it Frustrating-Folder to folder-I cant-delete.
That way when I come back to this some other day in the future.
And I'm wondering, what the heck is this all about?
I'll know what this folder is all about and not to spend any more time on it.
Someday maybe when I repurpose this eight
terabyte drive and I end up reformatting it, that'll make it all go away.
That's not an issue.
The issue here is that I'm not going
to waste my time looking for a lot of solutions to try and make this go away.
It's not worth it.
My takeaway for you is simply this when
you are facing a problem with your technology, please consider deeply
whether or not a solution really matters before you spend a bunch of time doing
something that ultimately may not even succeed.
Time, not technology.
It's probably your most valuable asset.
Not to mention the frustration from banging your head against the wall
trying to solve things that don't want to be solved.
Leaving it be is an option.
For comments, for updates,
for links related to this article and more, visit AskLeo.com/148857.
I'm Leo. Notenboom.
This is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.