Find files starting with ~$ (MicroSoft Word Temp files)

Question

For some reason my machine is full of M$ Word temporary files such as:

~$Filename.docx  
~$AnotherFile.docx

Can someone suggest a find/regex command to search $HOME and delete them?

Typical... just figured it... find . | egrep \~ | while read f; do mv "$f" ~/Desktop/Trash/;done

Gilles · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-06 23:37:31Z

up vote 4 down vote accepted

In bash 4 or above:

shopt -s globstar
rm ~/**/'~$'*

In zsh or ksh93, you can use the rm line above directly.

edited Apr 6 '12 at 23:37

Gilles
140k13160367

answered Apr 6 '12 at 10:38

Chris Down
20k22876

janos · Answer 2 · 2012-04-10 13:33:56Z

up vote 3 down vote

Use this to remove all files which start with ~$:

find /path/to/dir -name '~$*' -delete

edited Apr 10 '12 at 13:33

answered Apr 6 '12 at 9:42

janos
1,19129

5

No need for external rm, find can -delete itself: find /path/to/dir -name '~$*' -delete. – manatwork Apr 6 '12 at 10:19

True, thanks, updated the answer! – janos Apr 10 '12 at 13:34

2 Answers