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Comment by mmorey | Hacker News Reader

To find VIM swp files you can run this command on your public_html directory:

    find . -name "*.swp"

You can find and remove them with:

    find . -name "*.swp" -exec rm -f \{\} \;

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A solution using xargs instead of exec:

find . -name "*.swp" | xargs rm

I believe find -exec forks and execs once for every file found, xargs may only fork and exec once, provided that all of the files find finds fit in a single command line. Hopefully not an issue in this case, but it can greatly speed up a deletion when you have a lot of files to find and delete.

[EDIT] Doesn't properly handle spaces in filenames, see the comments below for other slick solutions.

Please don't run the command above, it doesn't handle spaces. You might delete something you didn't intend to delete.

You need to add -print0 to find, and -0 to xargs to make it work properly: find . -name "*.swp" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

But better would be to use -delete as I wrote above.

I'm a little bummed to find that this doesn't work on Solaris either (just checked). I don't generally use spaces in paths, but it's probably about half luck that I haven't been bitten by this yet. And sadly, I can't always just put GNU findutils on.

Technically, your solution does not work with files whose name contain a space or newline. A working solution is either to do '-print0' in find and '-0' in xargs, or to just use '-delete' instead of the -exec. It is also possible to use '+' instead of ';' with '-exec' to say "fork as few times as possible", ie pack the largest list of arguments to rm you can. But '-delete', when supported, won't even fork/exec.

Are these GNU find extensions? I spend a lot of time on solaris, and I don't remember seeing a delete option. Thanks for the tips though!

You're right, -delete is not standard, but I think that + and -print0 are.

For GNU: find . -name "*.swp" -delete

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