How to delete files of certain name from terminal recursively
I would like to delete all the emacs backup (~) files from subfolders.
I am aware that I can cd in every single folder and delete them using rm *~ (e.g. for backup file test.cpp~).
How I can delete these files with one command, without cd'ing in every folder?
(I tried rm -r *~ and rm -rf *~ but they don't seem to work)
Answer
You can do this with find and exec. Here's an example that does what you want to do:
find -name '*~' -exec rm {} \;
Let's break it down how this works. The find command will recurse through the directory it's executed from, and by default it will print out everything it finds. Using -name '*~' tells us only to select entries whose name matches the regex *~. We have to quote it because otherwise the shell might expand it for us. Using -exec rm {} will execute rm for each thing it finds, with {} as a placeholder for the filename. (The final ; is something required to tell find that this is where the command ends. It's not really a big deal but it'll whine and do nothing if you don't use it. The \ is to escape it because ; is a special shell character.)