[tetha]

For entirely critical systems, I by now rather generate a reviewable script and run that. Something along the lines of:

    find /backups/ -mtime '-30' -printf 'rm -f %p\n' > very_scary_deletes.sh

This gives you a static script with a bunch of rm's. You can read that, check it, give it to people to validate and when you eventually run it, it deletes exactly those files.

[_nalply]

That's clever, only do really dangerous things if you have a way to carefully review the steps.

Another way is sometimes: `echo *.txt~` and when you like the result, replace `echo` with `rm`.

[kevincox]

I do this too. Although I usually do `echo rm .txt~` then just remove the `echo` once everything works. Also works well for things like `parallel` and `xargs` where you can do `parallel echo rm -- .txt` and it basically prints out a script. Then you can remove the `echo` to run it.