Using Robocopy to move files to Null

Question

I'm trying to move files using robocopy to NULL in a powershell script, in effect deleting them. Normally I'd use get-childitem but I'm dealing with long file name paths and it fails on those, but robocopy won't. For some reason powershell is interpreting NULL as a folder it needs to create instead of copying it to the NULL device. Googling led me to think this is possible, but everywhere I saw people using NULL in the same way I'm trying to but were using it to find files matching a string, instead of moving the files. This is the part of the script that does the moving:

robocopy $directory NULL *.* /xf *.pst /e /mov

Anyone have any luck using robocopy to move files to NULL? Or is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Check out /purge. From the robocopy help file:

/PURGE :: delete dest files/dirs that no longer exist in source.

If you create a dummy folder that is empty, say C:\empty, you can use:

robocopy C:\empty $directory *.* /xf *.pst /e /purge