By valsgalore on

During the process of developing our first "test" Drupal site, I have made a lot of mistakes that have ended up in the Drupal directory.

For example, there are folders in the sitename/files/ directory that I want to get rid of because we have developed a more organized storage system. There is also a custom module I tried to write but must have messed up, because it didn't install properly. Now its folder sits in the sites/all/modules directory. Drupal doesn't recognize it (doesn't show up in the modules list), but I can't delete it!

Whenever I try to delete these files (via Windows Explorer on the local network), I get access denied errors--mostly, I think, because they are "in use."

Is there a way to get Drupal to delete these files and folders? Or some other way to gain control over them? I don't know anything about server administration, so if you have a solution, you might have to give me the second-grader explanation.

Thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

Ayesh’s picture

Ayesh commented

looks like your stack is Windows.
Try removing their read-only attribute and shutting down web server process.

In linux, the most usual problem is the Apache and the user are in separate users with tough permissions so user X can't delete files created by the web server user.
this can be fixed by changing permissions of these files as root.

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valsgalore’s picture

valsgalore commented

I may need to get some help determining whether we're running on Windows or Apache, and in shutting down the web server, but this is useful information to start with!

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

It's not windows or apache as they are different things. Windows is the operating system, and apache is the server - which is a piece of software that runs within windows. You could be using IIS, which is the windows server type, instead of apache, but it doesn't really matter for your problem. With your problem, the file and folder permissions have essentially been 'locked', which is why you cannot delete them. This happens at the Operating System level (Windows), so you will need to change the permissions on the folders/files. You will right-click on the folder, choose 'Properties', and do something in there. I haven't used windows for a few years now though, so I don't know what exactly you do after that - changing it from read only, as the last poster said, will probably solve your problem, though it may require some other change within there.