Question

I use Emacs and it sometimes makes backup for edited files. After a few days, I would have a lot of backup files whose name ends with a tilde.

Is there a way to find these files and delete them at once?

I tried this:

find "*" -type f -iname *~

But it doesn’t work. I want the command to work recursively – something like ls -alR.

Answer 1

You need to escape from the shell. And you need to specify search path, not *

find . -type f -name '*~'

To delete the files:

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