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From: wu@spot.Colorado.EDU (WU SHI-KUEI)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: cleanup script needed
Message-ID: <7140@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 6 Mar 89 16:01:41 GMT
References: <15659@oberon.USC.EDU> <9793@smoke.BRL.MIL> <80@torsqnt.UUCP>
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: wu@spot.Colorado.EDU (WU SHI-KUEI)
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 12

In article <80@torsqnt.UUCP> david@torsqnt.UUCP (David Haynes) writes:
>In article <9793@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>:In article <15659@oberon.USC.EDU> rkumar@buddha.usc.edu () writes:
>:>Will rm -r *.dvi do the job?
>:
>:No, try	"find . -name '*.dvi' -print | xargs rm".
>:
>Why not, 	"find . -type f -name '*.dvi' -exec rm {} \;" 	?

The 'xargs' version will be many times faster than the 'exec' version since the
latter invokes 'rm' for every file found while 'xargs' will invoke 'rm' only
once for every 470 characters in the command list (including spaces).