I edit text files on Linux and always end up with tons of backup files ending with ~ all over the place! How do you get rid of it?
If you edit files on linux, with emacs, vi, kate and others, chances are you'll end up with a lot of those backup files with names ending with ~, and removing them one by one is a pain.
Lucky enough, with a simple command you can get them all, and recursively. Simply go into the top of the directory tree you want to clean (be carefull, these commands are recursive, they will run through the subdirectories), and type
find ./ -name '*~' | xargs rmSome explanations:
- the command
find ./ -name '*~'will look for all files ending with~in the local directory and its subdirectories, - the sign
|is a 'pipe' that makes the outout of the previous command becoming the input of the next one, xargsreads the arguments on the standard input and applies it to the following commandrmdeletes whatever file you want.
And if you need a little help for all those unix commands, I really recommend the book Unix in a Nutshell
Edited and reformatted 10/2005
xcristi, 05 November 2005
If you have problem with the last variant (find: missing argument to `-exec'), write this way:
find ./ -name '*~' -exec rm '{}' ';' -print
Silvia, 24 June 2006
For find: missing argument to `-exec` error, I use:
find ./ -name '*~' -exec rm '{}' ; -print
Silvia, 24 June 2006
Sorry, it's: find ./ -name '*~' -exec rm '{}' \; -print (the slash disappears at submit)
Cezar, 23 November 2007
for correctly handling files with spaces in their names:
find . -name "*~" -type f -print0|xargs -0 rm
ben, 17 August 2004
or you can use :
find ./ -name '*~' -exec rm {} ; -print
This will execute the command rm for any files found. -print is optional, but it is nice to see what you are deleting!