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For entirely critical systems, I by now rather generate a reviewable script and run that. Something along the lines of:

    find /backups/ -mtime '-30' -printf 'rm -f %p\n' > very_scary_deletes.sh
This gives you a static script with a bunch of rm's. You can read that, check it, give it to people to validate and when you eventually run it, it deletes exactly those files.


That's clever, only do really dangerous things if you have a way to carefully review the steps.

Another way is sometimes: `echo *.txt~` and when you like the result, replace `echo` with `rm`.


I do this too. Although I usually do `echo rm .txt~` then just remove the `echo` once everything works. Also works well for things like `parallel` and `xargs` where you can do `parallel echo rm -- .txt` and it basically prints out a script. Then you can remove the `echo` to run it.




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