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A
Aegis_Kleais
Inspiring
October 18, 2013
Question

Systematically killing ASP.NET's red-headed stepchild, the aspnet_client folder.

  • October 18, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 1542 views

For those of you who don't know the "pleasure", upon installing .NET on your server (we had to, a 3rd party app we need uses it), Microsoft sees fit to propagate a "aspnet_client" folder into the root of every site on IIS as well as randomly through each site's subdirectories.  Truly, if I find the person responsible for this imbecile-ry, the b*tch-slapping will be pride obliterating.

But that aside, I have created a scheduled task to find all instances of this folder for a directory and below (the web root) and to remove it.  Well, the problem is that doing a <cfdirectory> listing, even when just specifying "dir" for type and "aspnet_client" for the filter, ColdFusion takes over 30 seconds and times out before it can get a complete listing of where these folders exist.

Can anyone think of an alternate way to get a listing of these folder locations?  Maybe directly through Java for a faster reading?  I run this script every hour on the hour, and it's just been timing out and never running (and the 'aspnet_client' folders have come back.)  I know this is a band-aid solution, but scouring the net for solutions on how to keep .NET from creating these abominations throughout a server has yielded nothing.

At least CF has the decency to just create a 'CFIDE' and 'jakarta' vdir in the root of the sites you connect CF to.  THAT shows smart programming.  Microsoft on the other hand..... the other.... b*tch slappin hand....

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    1 reply

    James Moberg
    James Moberg
    Inspiring
    October 18, 2013

    I created a .bat file in the root directory to identitify and remove all "aspnet_client" subdirectories.  (These sub-directories appear to be created whenever there is a Windows update... so you shouldn't have to run it hourly.)

    c:\remove_aspnet_client.bat

    FOR /F "tokens=*" %%G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S *aspnet_client*') DO RMDIR /S /Q "%%G"

    A
    Aegis_KleaisAuthor
    Inspiring
    October 18, 2013

    Love it, Jamo.  Sad that people have to resort to such a tactic simply because Microsoft is so myopic with this folder proliferation.

    I'm not as versed in batch scripts, but is there a way you could add an array/list of absolute URLs which are "whitelisted" from being removed (for the 3rd party apps we have that use .NET and may require the folder)

    James Moberg
    James Moberg
    Inspiring
    October 18, 2013

    I'm also not that well versed with writing loops and exception filters using the command line.

    Maybe another option would be to occassionally + manually create a BAT file with a RMDIR command for each project to clean and leave out all non-.NET webroots.  (The sub-directory isn't not added automatically... so you would only have to run it after an update.)

    I use a Windows file manager called Total Commander (32/64 bit, Windows, free, awesome IMHO). It has a "Find Files" feature that allows the results to be fed back to the listbox. After the "aspnet_client" sub-directories are in the listbox, I use a command to "Copy Names with Path to Clipboard".  I copy them to a BAT file and add the RMDIR command in front of each directory listing.  (For help on RMDIR syntax, go to DOS and enter RMDIR /?)   You can also use CFDirectory's delete with the "recurse" option, but I prefer not impact or be dependent on ColdFusion if I can help it.  (We also tend to use nnCron instead of CFSchedule.)

    Total Commander   http://www.ghisler.com/

    nnCron   http://www.nncron.ru/

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