AgeStore Fails to Remove Expired Debug Symbol Files - powershell

Question

I’m trying to use AgeStore to remove some expired symbol files. I’ve written a Powershell script in which the AgeStore command works sometimes, but, not always.
For example, my symbol store contains symbol files dating back to 2010. I’d like to clean out the “expired” symbols because they are no longer needed. To that end, I use the -date command line argument to specify “-date=10-01-2010”. Additionally, I use the “-l” switch to force AgeStore to
Causes AgeStore not to delete any files, but merely to list all the
files that would be deleted if this same command were run without the
-l option.
Here’s a snippet of the script code that runs…
$AgeStore = "$DebuggingToolsPath\AgeStore"
$asArgs = "`"$SymbolStorePath`" -date=$CutoffDate -s -y "
if ($WhatIf.IsPresent) { $asArgs += "-l" }
# determine size of the symbol store before delete operation.
Write-Verbose ">> Calculating current size of $SymbolStorePath before deletion.`n" -Verbose
">> $SymbolStorePath currently uses {0:0,0.00} GB`n" -f (((Get-ChildItem -R $SymbolStorePath | measure-object length -Sum ).Sum / 1GB))
Write-Verbose ">> Please wait...processing`n`n" -Verbose
& $AgeStore $asArgs
When the above code runs, it returns the following output…
processing all files last accessed before 10-01-2010 12:00 AM
0 bytes would be deleted
The program 'RemoveOldDebugSymbols.ps1: PowerShell Script' has exited
with code 0 (0x0).
I have verified that there are symbol files with dates earlier than “10-01-2010” in the symbol store. I’ve subsequently tried the same experiment with a different cutoff date, “11-01-2015” and the output indicates that there are several files it would have deleted, but, not those that are from 2010. I’m at a loss as to what may cause the discrepancy.
Has anyone tried to delete symbol files from a symbol store using AgeStore? If so, have you run into this problem? How did you resolve it?

Answer 1

I’ve tried to resolve this many different ways using AgeStore. For the sake of moving forward with a project, I’ve decided to rewrite the script to use the SymStore command with a delete transaction. Basically, I created a list of the debug symbol transactions that should be removed and wrote a loop that iterates over the list and deletes each entry one at a time.
Hope this is helpful for anyone who runs into the same problems.
EDIT: Per request....I cannot post the entire script, but, I used the following code in a loop as a replacement for the AgeStore command.
$ssArgs = ".\symstore.exe del /i $SymbolEntryTransactionID /s `"$SymbolStorePath`""
Invoke-Expression $ssArgs