Tim Van Wassenhove

Last couple of weeks I have been generating a lot of files (and restricting their ACLs) and today I decided to remove all those files. The problem is that my user account did not have permissions on those files. Here is a small script that will first take ownership of the file, then grants FullControl permissions, and finally removes the file

function RemoveFile
{
	param($FileName)

	&takeown /F $FileName

	$User = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().User

	$Acl = Get-Acl $FileName
	$Acl.SetOwner($User)
	$AccessRule = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule($User, "FullControl", "Allow")
	$Acl.SetAccessRule($AccessRule)
	Set-Acl $FileName $Acl

	Remove-Item $FileName
}

Get-ChildItem *.txt -R | % { RemoveFile $_.FullName; }

Edit on 2011-10-19

Resetting the permissions with icacls c:\output /reset /t and then calling Remove-Item c:\output -R does the trick.

function RemoveFiles
{
 param($Directory)
 icacls $Directory /reset /t
 Remove-Item $Directory -R
}

RemoveFiles c:\output;