[mauvehaus]

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.

[emillon]

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.

[mauvehaus]

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!

[emillon]

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

[nodata]

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.

[mauvehaus]

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.