Michael Freeman

Ok, that worked. Thanks Nergal! I guess the real issue is that the docs (that link I referenced in an earlier post) on this need to be cleaned up a bit, I think. From that page: "This selection is only relevant when you have selected Drive or Folder and have selected a folder. If you select Recurse Subfolders, CCleaner will include all subfolders within the selected folder. If this option is cleared, CCleaner will only clean items at the first folder level." Nothing is stated about what happens if you choose the third option: "files, subfolders, and the folder itself".

I think my problem has been misunderstood. Time to draw on my years in software QA and get hyper-detailed with steps to reproduce. Try the following. I just confirmed the problem on another machine running Windows Server 2008 R2. Create a folder named "foo" in your C drive. Create an empty file in C:\foo. Name it 1.txt. Create another empty file in c:\foo. Name it 2.bar Create an empty folder in c:\foo named "tmp" At this point C:\foo\ should have the following c:\foo\tmp\ c:\foo\1.txt c:\foo\2.bar In CCleaner, add a Custom File or Folder rule (Options -> Include -> Add). Under the "Include" section browse to c:\foo. Under the "File Types" section, select "File Types" and enter "*.bar" Under the "Options" section, select "Include files, subfolders and the folder itself". Run CCleaner. When it finishes, open c:\foo. You will see that 2.bar and the folder named "tmp" both got erased, even though the docs distinctly specify that your settings should have only resulted in 2.bar being erased. If you downgrade to CCleaner version 2.30 and repeat these steps you will see that only 2.bar gets erased, which is what is expected even in CCleaner 3.01 Hope this makes it clearer.

Update: This is present in at least one CCleaner 2.x version too. I found v2.36 and v2.30 on FileHippo and tried them both. v2.36 also has this bug. v2.30 does NOT have this bug. It only removes .class files from my c:\SVN folder tree...like I expected. This is definitely a defect. I have tried these versions all on a Windows 7 Enterprise x64 box, but I seriously doubt CCleaner won't show this defect on XP or Vista.

I'm not doing anything special to make CCleaner recursively clean c:\SVN. I just added an additional Custom File/Folder rule to CCleaner to clean out my SVN folders (see the screenshot below). These tmp entries should match a consistent pattern, because in a Subversion checkout, every folder has a .svn helper data folder inside it. The structure of this folder is a Subversion standard. According to http://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner/using-ccleaner/including-files-and-folders-for-cleaning I have correctly configured CCleaner to search through C:\SVN and all its subfolders and then remove files ending in ".class" and nothing else from those folders.

I have two SVN checkouts nested under C:\SVN. I have CCleaner 3.01 set to recurse through them and delete all .class files (to prep my Java code for a clean build). It seems that CCleaner 3.01 automatically removes all folders named "tmp" also. This is not documented, not requested in my Custom Files and Folders section, and has the side effect of screwing up my SVN checkouts. This doesn't happen in CCleaner 2.X. It only erases what I ask it to. Thanks Michael