One approach (which I've used in our build definition where we ensure we have a clean workspace) is to rename all folders to "a" and recursively dig into them b

One approach (which I've used in our build definition where we ensure we have a clean workspace) is to rename all folders to "a" and recursively dig into them before deleting. So \a_quite\long\path\with_files\module.js becomes \a\a\a\a\module.js And you can usually delete that quite fine. It's terrible. It's ugly. But it works.