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Powershell Remove Symbolic Link Windows

Writer Emily Wong

I am having issues when removing SymbolicLinks which I have created with New-Item:

New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path C:\SPI -Target "C:\Users\Chino\Dropbox (Reserve Membership)\"

I need to modify the link because it has the wrong -Target, which should be:

New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path C:\SPI -Target "C:\Users\Chino\Dropbox (Reserve Membership)\SPI"

How to remove that link and assign a new one? Alternatively, how to update the target path of the existing link?

3

3 Answers

Calling Delete() on the corresponding DirectoryInfo object should do the trick:

(Get-Item C:\SPI).Delete()
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path C:\SPI -Target "C:\Users\Chino\Dropbox (Reserve Membership)\SPI"
1

If you want to change the target path of the existing symbolic link C:\SPI from "C:\Users\Chino\Dropbox (Reserve Membership)\" to "C:\Users\Chino\Dropbox (Reserve Membership)\SPI\" you do not need to delete the link beforehand. Simply including the -Force parameter to overwrite the link works for me in PowerShell 5.1 on Windows 10 Pro v1603:

New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path C:\SPI -Target "C:\Users\Chino\Dropbox (Reserve Membership)\SPI" -Force
1

No way to update the symbolic link as far as I know. Gotta use CMD to remove symbolic link and you could then re-create it using your powershell script. You would do it like this in powershell.

cmd /c "rmdir C:\SPI"

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