Hide and Seek With OneNote

I often open command windows on Windows via shift + right click on a directory. It’s a handy way to open a cmd window right where you want one. Ironically the option directly below Open command window here is Open as Notebook in OneNote. I accidentally clicked the OneNote option and it turned out to be a pretty interesting 10 pixel mistake.

Some backstory - my original intent was to open a cmd window to the source directory of my blog to build it (I’m using Octopress). At first it wasn’t clear what clicking the OneNote option actually did. However, after a little poking around I was seeing a OneNote Table Of Content.onetoc2 file in every directory of my blog output. That is, I didn’t see these in the blog source directory, but every time I would build my blog they would show up in every output directory.

I tried grepping for interesting files/directories in the blog source, but nothing showed up. I tried manually browsing through the source directory structure. Also note that I had show hidden files and folders turned on. Still, I found nothing.

After some digging, and a lot of help from this post it turns out that there were several OneNote files embedded and hidden in every directory of my blog source. The only way I was able to see them was to display them in a cmd window via

dir /A:H /B

After it was clear that they were indeed there but hidden, I was able to delete them via

del /S /A:H *.onetoc2