find /path/to/dir -name name_of_file_to_match | xargs /bin/rm
I use often the above command to clean a directory from all the back up files created by emacs, so for example if I am developing a site at: /var/www/a-site/ then at the end of the day or at the beginning of a new one I clean up the directory as follow:
find /var/www/a-site -name '*~' | xargs rm
Be careful with the above command, specially if you run it as root and you get wrong the regex you could delete things you didn’t mean to !
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you can achieve the same result like this:
find . -name '*~' -exec rm {} \;damn, they modified my ‘ but you get the point :)
Thanks Florian,
you are absolutely right,
rmwill be executed for each file discovered byfind.The curly brackets
{}are replaced with the current discovered file.The semicolon
;signals the end of the arguments passed tormThe backslash
\escapes the semicolon;fixed.