In computing, del
(or erase
) is a command in all DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows command line interpreters (shells) such as COMMAND.COM
, cmd.exe
, 4DOS, NDOS, 4OS2, 4NT and Windows PowerShell. It is used to delete one or more files or directories from a filesystem. It is analogous to the Unix rm
command. RT-11, RSX-11 and OpenVMS also provide the delete
command which can be contracted to del
.
In Windows PowerShell, del and erase are a predefined command aliases for the Remove-Item
cmdlet which basically serves the same purpose.
While DR-DOS supports del
and erase
as well, it also supports the shorthand form era
, which derived from CP/M. In addition to this, the DR-DOS command processor also supports delq
/eraq
. These are shorthand forms for the del
/era
/erase
command with an assumed /Q
parameter (for 'Query') given as well.