I deploy a lot of environments where there is some form of folder redirection – be it classical folder redirection using a GPO or UPD on Windows Virtual Desktop, or even Known Folder Redirection using OneDrive. The benefits to using these forms of folder redirection is clear, but comes with another cool feature; The recycle bin is often redirected too. This is great because each user has his own recycler this way and we never have to worry about anyone seeing files or folders from anyone else.

The downside to this is that it can quickly eat away at disk space you don’t want to lose, Which is why I’ve built the following component, you can run this from your RMM system, put it in a logon script or logoff script in your GPO, or just run it on demand.

You can modify $days to set to any amount, 0 means it will clear the entire recycle bin for that user – Something we often don’t like doing as accidental deletes can happen.

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$Days = 14
$Shell = New-Object -ComObject Shell.Application
$Global:Recycler = $Shell.NameSpace(0xa)
foreach ($item in $Recycler.Items()) {
    $DateDel = $Recycler.GetDetailsOf($item, 2) -replace "\u200f|\u200e", "" | get-date
    If ($DateDel -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-$Days)) { Remove-Item -Path $item.Path -Confirm:$false -Force -Recurse }
}

And that’s it! as always, Happy PowerShelling!