How do you run a dry run of rm to see what files will be deleted?

Question

I want to see what files will be deleted when performing an 'rm' in linux. Most commands seem to have a dry run option to show just such information, but I can't seem to find such an option for rm. Is this even possible?

(Note: sorry if I gave this question the wrong tags, I wasn't exactly sure what tags were appropriate for the question)

Answer 1

Say you want to run:

rm *.txt

You can just run:

echo rm *.txt

or even just:

echo *.txt

to see what files rm would delete, because it's the shell expanding the *.txt, not rm.

The only time this won't help you is for rm -r.

If you want to remove files and directories recursively, then you could use find instead of rm -r, e.g.

find . -name "*.txt" -print

then if it does what you want, change the -print to -delete:

find . -name "*.txt" -delete

Answer 2

You can say:

rm -i

to run it in interactive mode, so rm will prompt you to confirm whether each file should be deleted. You could just answer no to each file to see which ones would be affected.