What is wrong with this “find all vim swap files and remove them with a confirmation” command?

Question

I am trying to remove all vim swap file *.swp and remove them with a confirmation. The find command found the files, but rm says No such file or directory with the -i option. When I hardcode the path of the file and just use rm -i then it seems to work.

See below

(doors)hobbes3@hobbes3 ~/Sites $ find mysite mysite_BAK -name *.swp -exec 'rm -i {}' \;
find: rm -i mysite/templates/.base.html.swp: No such file or directory
find: rm -i mysite/templates/doors/orders/.create.html.swp: No such file or directory
find: rm -i mysite/templates/doors/orders/.detail.html.swp: No such file or directory
find: rm -i mysite/templates/doors/orders/.list.html.swp: No such file or directory
(doors)hobbes3@hobbes3 ~/Sites $ rm -i mysite/templates/.base.html.swp 
remove mysite/templates/.base.html.swp? n

I guess I'm doing something wrong with the -exec option. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The error is generated by find, not rm.

The reason is that you have written it so 'rm -i <file>' is the single argument. This shall be rewritten:

find mysite mysite_BAK -name *.swp -exec rm -i '{}' \;

so find gets multiple arguments after "-exec" and treats the first one as command and others as the command arguments.