I'm looking for a way to delete automatic backup files (those on the form "filename.extension~") from a external hard drive, where I keep a backup from my main disk.
If the files were in /home, I could erase them with bleachbit or a similar program, like ubuntu tweak.
Is it possible to do?
Here's a command-line way of doing this using find. It's a little bit more advanced than using a GUI like Ubuntu Tweak, though.
Find the mount point of your external hard drive. Several ways exist:
In a terminal identify the hard drive using cat /proc/mounts and locate the mount point. Example:
/dev/sdc1 /media/1589-880A vfat rw,nosuid,[...]
Indicates the mount point as /media/1589-880A.
Open a terminal and use the following find command to list the files matching the search we're performing. Replace the /media path here with the mount point you just found in the previous step. I've added -type f to filter for files only - disregarding links and directories.
find /media/1589-880A -name "*~" -type f
If you feel happy about the results and you are sure you want to delete these files, then perform the delete like this:
find /media/1589-880A -name "*~" -type f -delete
Note: These files will not be sent to the Trash! They go to oblivion straight away. No easy undo exists. Don't ask for undoing this.
Feel free to modify the *~ pattern to allow other matches for other use cases (e.g. *.bak, autobackup-2012-*.tar.gz, etc. It's just using plain shell globbing. It's also perfectly possible to select a sub folder or even a parent folder instead of the mount point. Anyway, always list first before deleting!
Optionally add -xdev to the find command to prevent it descending into other file systems if you're unsure about it.
