search for files and delete from the whole system file

Question

If you create a file or just open a file with some programs like gedit, it will make auto save files named like this file~. For example if i do this gedit file.txt then when i close the file i can find two files file.txt and file.txt~.

What i want to do is to search the "/" whole file system for these files and then delete them. Note that those files could be other things not just text files.Thanks foe helping

It's not duplicate i want to delete in the whole system not in a single place — user260119, Mar 21 '14 at 04:56
for that you'd use sudo find / ... ... [not recommended] to adapt the answer in the link to suit your need.. but I don't think you need to do this, the system config file-backups won't take much space, and they could prove useful.. instead you can just do this for user-home directories find $HOME ... ... — rusty, Mar 21 '14 at 05:02
Do not delete in the whole system! The filesystem is managed by Ubuntu itself and if you try collect garbage that way you may end up with broken system! — Danatela, Mar 21 '14 at 05:02
Why i should not do it for the whole system?!! how could it be end with broken system? — user260119, Mar 21 '14 at 05:04

Radu Rădeanu · Answer 1 · 2014-03-21T05:20:15.177

1

To delete all backup files ending in ~ from the whole system, you can use:

sudo find / -type f -name '*~' -exec rm -f {} \;

Warning: I suggest you to run first find / -type f -name '*~' to see exactly what you will delete.

edited Mar 21 '14 at 05:20

answered Mar 21 '14 at 05:09

Radu Rădeanu

169,590

This will not work if there is an extension. Am i right? since ~ will not include files that has more than something like ~.txt – user260119 Mar 21 '14 at 05:15
*~.txt ?!?! Doesn't exists such kind of backup files AFAIK. Only if you created manually. It's about *.txt~ and yes, my answer will work for these files, too. – Radu Rădeanu Mar 21 '14 at 05:19
@RaduRădeanu what about using -ok instead of -exec? With -ok, the deletion will be interactive. Please comment! – DK Bose Mar 21 '14 at 18:23
@DKBose OK; also you can use rm -i instead of rm -f for the same purpose. – Radu Rădeanu Mar 21 '14 at 18:56

search for files and delete from the whole system file

1 Answers1