.NET bin and obj Directory Cleaner

Sep 3, 2026 # .NET, CLI

Because I write a lot of blog posts, I have a lot of .NET projects on my disks. After building or running each project, a bin and obj directory is created. These directories take up a lot of space, and if I want to copy projects from one disk to another, they slow down the copy because of the number of files in these directories.

Here is a .NET CLI tool that will print out delete commands for all the bin and obj directories in a given directory. It doesn’t run the commands. You should review them before you run them.

 1#!/usr/bin/env -S dotnet --
 2#:sdk Microsoft.NET.Sdk
 3
 4var isPowerShell = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PSModulePath") != null;
 5if (isPowerShell && (args.Length == 0 || args[0] == "."))
 6{
 7    Console.Error.WriteLine("PowerShell does not propagate its current directory to child processes.");
 8    Console.Error.WriteLine("Pass an absolute path or $PWD, e.g.: DotNetBinObjCleaner.cs $PWD");
 9    return 1;
10}
11
12var invocationDir = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PWD") ?? Directory.GetCurrentDirectory();
13var startDir = args.Length > 0 ? Path.GetFullPath(args[0], invocationDir) : invocationDir;
14
15if (args.Length == 0)
16{
17    Console.Write($"Start search in current directory '{startDir}'? [y/N] ");
18    var response = Console.ReadLine()?.Trim().ToLower();
19    if (response != "y")
20    {
21        Console.WriteLine("Aborted.");
22        return 0;
23    }
24}
25
26if (!Directory.Exists(startDir))
27{
28    Console.Error.WriteLine($"Error: directory not found: {startDir}");
29    return 1;
30}
31
32var projectDirs = new List<string>();
33FindProjectDirs(startDir, projectDirs);
34
35var toDelete = new List<string>();
36foreach (var dir in projectDirs)
37{
38    foreach (var name in new[] { "bin", "obj" })
39    {
40        var path = Path.Combine(dir, name);
41        if (Directory.Exists(path))
42            toDelete.Add(path);
43    }
44}
45
46if (toDelete.Count == 0)
47{
48    Console.WriteLine("No bin/obj folders found.");
49    return 0;
50}
51
52Console.WriteLine("# PowerShell");
53foreach (var path in toDelete)
54    Console.WriteLine($"Remove-Item -Recurse -Force '{path}'");
55
56Console.WriteLine();
57
58Console.WriteLine("# Bash");
59foreach (var path in toDelete)
60    Console.WriteLine($"rm -rf '{path}'");
61
62return 0;
63
64void FindProjectDirs(string dir, List<string> results)
65{
66    if (Directory.GetFiles(dir, "*.csproj").Length > 0)
67    {
68        results.Add(dir);
69        return;
70    }
71
72    try
73    {
74        foreach (var sub in Directory.GetDirectories(dir))
75            FindProjectDirs(sub, results);
76    }
77    catch (UnauthorizedAccessException) { }
78}

Save this to a file to a directory that is in your PATH and you can run it from anywhere.

That’s it, easy cleanup of your .NET projects.

.NET CLI

.NET bin and obj Directory Cleaner

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