This tool takes a single argument on the command line:
RecursiveDelete foo\bar\node_modules
and it will delete the specified folder and all of its contents. In order to
walk around limitations in the Windows API, we rename the folders to @ on
the way down the tree in order to shorten the path names, so that we don't
get errors because the path exceeds 250.
When working with npm it is not unusal to get node_modules directory
trees which are very deep, with paths reaching lengths of 400 or more
characters (this is a known issue).
Trying to delete these folders with the Windows Explorer results in error messages complaining about the fact that the path is too long and deletion becomes a nightmare.
To circumvent this problem, I've written this tiny naive tool which just walks the folder structure, renames every folder to a one-character length name while descending the tree, and then deletes everything while moving back up the tree.
Sometimes, folders or files are in use (usually by the explorer process,
but this might also be the antivirus kicking in) and the tool cannot delete
or rename some folders or files.
Usually, the resulting folder structure has already been shortened enough so that you can simply delete the remaining garbage with the Windows Explorer