What is an equivalent of rm `find lib/ -name *.swp` without find?

Question

As in the title, I would like to remove all files in the lib directory with .swp in the end.

How can I do this without find in:

rm `find lib/ -name *.swp`

Answer 1

The benefit to find is that it is recursive. Some modern shells offer search recursion, but it is not in the POSIX standard, so you can not rely on them to work everywhere. Here is an example that works in bash 4.0 and higher.

shopt -s globstar
for f in **/*.swp; do
    rm -- "$f"
done

As far as the find command that you already have, it will break on any files that contain whitespace such as spaces. Here is a fixed example:

find lib/ -name '*.swp' -exec rm {} +

With some versions of find, you can use -delete:

find lib/ -name '*.swp' -delete

Answer 2

cd lib && ls -R  | grep '\.swp$' | xargs -d '\n' rm

As for your original, I'd have done it:

find lib -name '*.swp' | xargs -d '\n' rm

because if find returns no results you won't get an error.

You might also want to use \! -type d so find doesn't return any directories which happen to be called *.swp, because rm would fail to remove them. You could do something similar with my alternative using ls -RF because directories would get a trailing / so not match the regex.