It's more efficient to use the pipe with xargs. If you're removing 10,000 files,...

e40 on June 26, 2011 | parent | context | favorite | on: Things you (probably) didn't know about xargs

It's more efficient to use the pipe with xargs. If you're removing 10,000 files, the difference in time between -exec (and fork/exec of rm 10,000 times) and xargs rm is quite significant. (On my system getconf MAX_ARGS is 2180000.)