It is a common task to recursively seek and destroy all .pyc files within current
directory. The following command does that for us in a bash shell.
find . -name "*.pyc" -type f -exec rm "{}" \;
Simply typing find . -name "*.pyc" -type f would list all files (and not directories)
whose name matches the glob *.pyc within the directory . (current directory).
find also accepts -exec option in both Linux and MacOS (though -delete
option may not
always be available). See other variants
here.
The above command works even for filenames or paths that have spaces in them.
In contrast, using find . -name "*.pyc" -type f | xargs rm is risky when filenames or paths
contain spaces. Here is a demo:
# In a bash shell
$ find . -name "*.pyc" -type f
./hello world.pyc
./p q r/this has spaces.pyc
./p q r/d.pyc
./abc.pyc
./a/pqr.pyc
$ find . -name "*.pyc" -type f -exec rm "{}" \;
$ find . -name "*.pyc" -type f
# Nothing anymore!