So I had this idea to make an old school adventure game using the directory system on my computer. Every decision you could make would be a different folder, and each folder would then contain a few more folders to choose from. Of course, this meant making thousands of folders, many of which would be redundant, and so I decided that the best way to make it would be by writing a brief little program. My proof of concept was a hedge maze, without any decisions at each step besides North, East, South, and West; before I did that, though, I wanted to check that my code for making a large nested directory tree worked, and so I wrote up my program. And then I compiled it. And ran it.

Hagrid.java was only a few seconds into creating his hedge maze when I had the horrifying realization that I had told my computer to make a directory tree with a depth of 100, and was thus on my way to creating 4¹⁰⁰ nested folders. I immediately reset my computer, but by the time I had booted it up again, there were 33,315,196 folders on my desktop.

Shift-Del gave an estimated time of 12 days to delete the thing, so I just made sure it wasn't being indexed by the computer and set it as an operating system file, so I'll never have to see it again. Nobody will ever know.

But I know. I know that somewhere, hidden on my desktop, there are millions and millions of empty folders. :(

Edit 4: Thank you everyone who made suggestions on how to fix my ridiculous problem! The one that finally did the trick was

cd blank
robocopy blank "Hedge Maze" /mir > NUL

which fixed everything in a mere five or so hours. I've also edited my previous edit to say where my background's from and give a non-compressed version.

Thanks all! You make my mistakes a joy

Edit 3: Here's my wallpaper, which is originally from the SEGA game Streets of Rage.

Edit 2: Yes, I tried rmdir /s /q and not just Shift-Del. The reason why I decided just to hide them all was because that was also taking a kind of preposterous amount of time. (Then again, I have the patience of a flea, so who knows...)

Edit: Proof! Well, kinda. My earlier attempts to delete got rid of around a million files, so I guess you'll just have to take it on faith that there were 33 million and not just 32.

Hagrid.java: (use at your own peril)

import java.io.File;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;

    public class Hagrid {
    final static List<String> compass = new ArrayList<>(Arrays.asList("N","E","S","W"));

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        File root = new File("C:/Users/.../Desktop/Hedge Maze");
        gogogo(root,100);
    }

    public static void gogogo(File root, int depth) {
        if (depth == 0) return;
        for (String s : compass) {
            File subdir = new File(root,s);
            subdir.mkdirs();
            gogogo(subdir,depth-1);
        }
    }
}