According to the Emacs manual:
How backups are operated in Emacs is configurable to some degree:
(setq backup-by-copying t ; don't clobber symlinks
version-control t ; use versioned backups
delete-old-versions t
kept-new-versions 6
kept-old-versions 2)~’ in Dired to mark the files, then ‘x’ to delete them.find -name "*~" | xargs rm
find -name "*~" -print0 | xargs -0 rm
find -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;See also AutoSave, BackupDirectory and BackupEachSave.