Avoid buggy Remove-Item -Recurse in PsWriter.RmDir

Tony Marshrequested to merge
fix/issue-38717-pwsh-rmdir-remove-item-recurse into main

What does this MR do?

Fixes intermittent build-directory cleanup failures on Windows PowerShell/pwsh executors.

Closes #38717 (closed)

Root cause

The fallback branch of the script generated by PsWriter.RmDir (shells/powershell.go) used:

Remove-Item -Force -Recurse <path>

Remove-Item -Recurse has a documented known issue (see Example 4): deletion order is not guaranteed to be children-first, so it can intermittently fail with The directory is not empty. This surfaced during handleGetSourcesStrategy cleanup with GIT_STRATEGY: clone on projects with deep directory trees, failing the job before any user script ran.

The primary branch (Remove-Item2 from the NTFSSecurity module) is unaffected and unchanged; only runners without that module hit the buggy fallback.

The fix

Replace the fallback with the same Get-ChildItem pipeline pattern already used by RmFilesRecursive / RmDirsRecursive:

Get-ChildItem -Path <path> -Force -Recurse | Sort-Object { $_.FullName.Length } -Descending | Remove-Item -Force
Remove-Item -Force <path>
  • Sorting by path length descending guarantees children are deleted before their parents (a child path is always strictly longer than its parent's).
  • -Force on Get-ChildItem includes hidden/system files (e.g. .git contents).
  • The now-empty root is then removed without -Recurse, avoiding the buggy code path entirely.

Note this is broader than the one-liner proposed in the issue (Get-ChildItem <path> -Recurse | Remove-Item -Force), which would leave the root directory in place and still fail on non-empty subdirectories, since Get-ChildItem -Recurse yields parents before children.

Changes

  • shells/powershell.go - RmDir fallback branch
  • shells/powershell_test.go - updated expected-script literals (rmdir template test, cleanGitConfigs blocks in TestPowershell_GenerateScript)
  • docs/shells/_index.md - example script synced (locale copies left to translation sync)

Verification

  • go test -race ./shells/... -count=1 passes locally
  • Validated on a test runner instance (Windows, pwsh executor)

Triage note

/cc @adebayo_a - flagging per triage guidelines: the linked issue carries the Customer Interest label.

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