core files on my system have the pid appended, so: find / -name "core.[0-9]*" -exec ls -l {} \; (might be a 2.6-ism) Also, I would never rm the files without thinking about it first, hence the change from rm to ls -l But better is to find all large recent files: find / -size +1000000c -mtime -1 | xargs ls -l prints all files changed more recently than one day ago and larger than 1MB