Cleaning up with find(1)

I often use SPC / in Doom Emacs for +default/search-project. I also often use C-x v ​~ for vc-revision-other-window to compare a file in another branch in version control. I noticed the other day while searching my project that it was finding a whole lot of matches in files I had compared with another branch, which look something like file.h~staging~. But I had closed them, so why were they still showing up?

I looked at +default/search-project, and saw that it calls the related function in Vertico (the completion framework I use), which is basically just running a text search on the directory. So…maybe these files are still there? Yes - turns out vc-revision-other-window leaves behind the files it creates, so it doesn’t need to check them out again if you need them again. (Here is a solution someone else came up with for this problem.)

I just wanted to run a one-off cleanup, since I had a lot of cruft there. I figured I could use find with a regex, which I could, but I just had to figure out that the regex needs to match the whole name, not just part of it. So my final result was:

find . -regex ".*\.~.*~" | xargs rm

(At some point in the future, I would like to make a function that will kill the temp buffer, close the window it opened, and delete the file.)