Paolo Casarini

If you want to delete, for example, only .bak files throughout a directory tree you can try with the following command:

$ find . -name *.bak -exec rm {} \;


Using the same approach you can solve more complex problems. For example you can delete recursively all directories older than one week:

$ find . -mtime +7 -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;


Another example, for subversion users, could be the way to clean up a check-out directory:

$ find . -name lock -exec rm {} \;


Or a way to drop all .svn metadata directories:

$ find . -name .svn -exec -type d rm -rf {} \;


Now it’s up to you to find other examples…

Tags: shell commands, unix