Sometimes when I’m working on something related to SharePoint, I come across scenarios where I’m constantly building up test data in Lists. Frequently when doing this, I have a need to almost constantly delete and recreate list items.

Rather than using the UI or writing nice PowerShell one-liners (which for the record I love doing), I decided to throw together a little script for this.

This script takes two mandatory parameters, one for URL and one for List Name. Assuming you give it the correct values, it will quickly use Object Model code to call the Delete() method against every item in the list (or library).

Here is the script, hope it works for you! Note: I did not add any kind of confirmation, so if you run this – it WILL literally delete all items, it won’t first make sure you’re serious about it – so make sure you know what you’re doing! 🙂

RD

<#
.Synopsis
	Use this PowerShell Script to delete all list items, very quickly!
.Description
	This advanced script uses SharePoint Cmdlets and the SP Object Model to bulk 
	delete SharePoint list items from a specified SPList.
.Example
	C:\PS>.\Delete-SPListItems.ps1 -Url http://intranet -ListName "Test List"
	This example deletes list items from a list called Test List in the
	http://intranet web.
.Notes
	Name: Delete-SPListItems
	Author: Ryan Dennis
	Last Edit: 8/2/2012
	Keywords: Delete List Items
.Link
	http://www.sharepointryan.com
 	http://twitter.com/SharePointRyan
.Inputs
	None
.Outputs
	None
#Requires -Version 2.0
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][System.String]$Url,
[Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][System.String]$ListName
)
$Web = Get-SPWeb $Url
$List = $Web.lists[$ListName]
if($List -eq $null){
	Write-Error "The List cannot be found";return
}
Write-Warning "Deleting all list items from $($ListName)"
$Items = $List.GetItems()
$Items | ForEach-Object{
$List.GetItemById($_.Id).Delete()
}
$List.Update()
$Web.Dispose()