This week is cleaning week, and we’ll show you tactics how you can potentially retrieve gigabytes of disk space, especially with machines that have been running for a while.
You may know about your personal temp folder ($env:temp), and maybe you even clean it occasionally. Here is a script telling you just how much stuff there is lingering around that hasn’t been touched in more than three months:
# look at temp files older than 3 months $cutoff = (Get-Date).AddMonths(-3) $space = Get-ChildItem "$env:temp" -Recurse -Force | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -lt $cutoff } | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Sum 'Taken space: {0:n1} MB' -f ($space/1MB)
But did you know that Windows has its own temp folder as well? You should clear that one as well once in a while. For that, you do need Administrator privileges. Here is an adaption of the former script, this time checking the Windows temp folder:
#Requires -RunAsAdministrator # must run with admin privileges! # look at temp files older than 3 months $cutoff = (Get-Date).AddMonths(-3) $space = Get-ChildItem "$env:windir\temp" -Recurse -Force | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -lt $cutoff } | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Sum 'Taken space: {0:n1} MB' -f ($space/1MB)