How can I remove all "name" files in all of my subdirectories on Linux

Remove all *.swp files underneath the current directory, use the

find

command in one of the following forms:

find . -name \*.swp -type f -delete

The

-delete

option means find will directly delete the matching files. This is the best match to OP's actual question.

Using

-type f

means find will only process files.

find . -name \*.swp -type f -exec rm -f {} \;

find . -name \*.swp -type f -exec rm -f {} +

Option

-exec

allows find to execute an arbitrary command per file. The first variant will run the command once per file, and the second will run as few commands as possible by replacing

{}

with as many parameters as possible.

find . -name \*.swp -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

Piping the output to

xargs

is used form more complex per-file commands than is possible with

-exec

. The option

-print0

tells

find

to separate matches with ASCII NULL instead of a newline, and

-0

tells

xargs

to expect NULL-separated input. This makes the pipe construct safe for filenames containing whitespace.