> Second does what I expect

Both do what you expect once you understand `-name` and `-delete` are predicates (not switches) and find short-cuts.

The other big gotcha that took a while to sink in was

  find -name "foo*" -or -name "*bar" -print

which should actually be

  find \( -name "foo*" -or -name "*bar" \) -print

to do what you might expect (print things matching beginning with foo or ending with bar)

Without the parens, it gets interpreted as

  -name "foo*" -or ( -name "*bar" -and -print ), 

and hence only prints things that match the latter predicate.

Yes, well I know that now that I lost the contents of a project directory. Live and learn.

I'm suitably conditioned at this point to always give it a trial run with -print before using -delete, and -exec echo '{}' \; before any potentially dangerous commands.

Once bitten, etc...