I had the same problem. In my case, it was a typo in command for .NET Core publish:

dotnet publish "Api.csproj" --output "....\output\"

Only this command helped:

rmdir /s /q ....\

I had the same problem. In my case, it was a typo in command for .NET Core publish:

dotnet publish "Api.csproj" --output "....\output\"

It created the directory with name '....', which I couldn't remove or rename. This directory acted like reference to parent directory. If I go inside that folder, I still was in parent folder, but path was appended by '....'.

I tried all of the commands mentioned in this topic, but none of them worked. In my understanding, it acted like that, because I had other files and directories in parent directory, so I had to use parameters that can recursively deletes all the content.

I found out, that this command:

rmdir /s /q ....\

can remove the '....' directory. It only deletes the reference to parent directory, which this '....' directory actually is, nothing more, nothing less. Despite the command arguments:

• /s - removes all the content inside removed directory,
• /q - removes without confirmation,

the parent directory remained untouched.