For those of us on real operating systems (Mac or Linux), deleting scads of unwanted files is easy! Let’s say you’ve got a project that’s chock full of .svn directories, because it’s your Subversion working copy, and you need to get rid of them. You could do an svn export, but that won’t pick up any un-commited changes you might have in your working copy.

Welcome to the power of find!

find . -name .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

The above command finds all .svn directories in the current folder and below and kills them. No muss, no fuss.

You can do the same type of thing to remove other files, too. Need to add essentially a whole project to source control (svn add * or similar) and you’ve got a bunch of TextMate files lying around? (Which will happen if your project lives on a SMB-mounted or otherwise non-HFS disk):

find . -name '._' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Be careful with these — they’ll easily wreck entire directory structures if the find command returns too many results or if it’s run one directory too high. Always test the find command without -print0 before piping to rm or the like.