Ryan Seghers' Blog

I just found a good way to delete a bunch of programming tool temporary files (like .obj and .pdb files). I have a directory under which I have hundreds of development projects in different languages, and to back it up I either have to select the files I specifically want to backup or delete the files I don't want to backup first. So far I'd been using a script, but due to my discontent with the excruciating awkwardness of JScript, I'm switching to using Agent Ransack....

I've been using Mythicsoft's Agent Ransack disk search utility because it searches so much faster than Windows' search capability. You can also use it to delete files by regular expression, and save the search expression to a file so you don't have to enter it each time you want to do the clean. That's great because it makes the clean I want to do fast and easy. I had a couple minor issues with it:
1) The Save Search Criteria dialog makes it sound like you're saving a Search Result, but it's okay, it's actually saving the search criteria.
2) The saved search criteria file (.srf) isn't associated with Agent Ransack by the installer, so you have to do that once yourself using right-click -> Open with... -> Choose program).

Update: Since this post I've started using Jeff Atwood's Clean Sources Plus, (created from Omar Shahine's original Clean Sources). Clean Sources Plus adds a context menu item to Windows Explorer, so it is very handy. It deletes files based on regex's stored in a .config file, so it makes preparing source directories for backup a snap.