Uses zsh globbing syntax to safely remove all the files known to be generated by LaTeX, but only if there is actually a .tex source file with the same basename present. So we don't accidentally delete a .nav .log or .out file that has nothing to do with LaTeX, e/'[[ -f ${REPLY:r}.tex ]]'/ actually checks for the existance of a .tex file of the same name, beforehand. A different way to do this, would be to glob all *.tex files and generate a globbing pattern from them: TEXTEMPFILES=(*.tex(.N:s/%tex/'(log|toc|aux|nav|snm|out|tex.backup|bbl|blg|bib.backup|vrb|lof|lot|hd|idx)(.N)'/)) ; rm -v ${~TEXTEMPFILES} or, you could use purge() from grml-etc-core ( http://github.com/grml/grml-etc-core/blob/master/usr_share_grml/zsh/functions/purge )

recursively delete empty directories and directories which only contain empty directories using zsh globbing syntax. ** is for recursive globbing. *(/^F) matches all entries that are directories which are not full. If you only want to delete empty directories and not those directories which contained only empty directories and will be empty afterwards, just leave out the options to rmdir: rmdir **/*(/^F)

recursively deletes all broken symlinks using zsh globbing syntax.

end_w_nl filename will check if the last byte of filename is a unix newline character. tail -c1 yields the file's last byte and xxd converts it to hex format.