During a recent information architecture project for a client who was migrating data from a single site collection to thirteen site collections, I realized that I would need to delete one of the subsites contained within the original site collection.  It would have been nice and simple if I just needed to delete the site collection, but unfortunately this was not the case.  The problem was the overwhelming number of sites that needed to be deleted.  We all love using the stsadm command line tool, but one shortfall is that you cannot delete a site that contains a subsite.  In the past I have bit the bullet and deleted sites, one at at time, using the stsadm –o deleteweb command, but I did not have the time or patience for that in this situation. 

After doing some online research I found the answer I was looking for; there “IS” a better way to delete sites in SharePoint!  Gary Lapointe has created a new command called gl-deleteweb2.  It behaves similarly to the original stsadm –o deleteweb command except that you can pass a ”recurse”  switch to have it delete recursively (delete the web and all it's children).  The solution was extremely easy to download and install and saved me a huge amount of time. 

Check out the solution which can be found at http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/09/better-delete-web.html