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

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

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.

You can use ls to list all the files that will be removed by rm:

ls ../path/*.txt

If you need to list to view the files that will be deleted with a recursive rm, then use the -R flag with ls:

ls -R ../path/*.txt