Use rm -v to see which files are being removed

• Tagged with shell scripting
• Posted 18 May 2025

I made a typo today that revealed an interesting flag in rm: if you pass -v/--verbose, it prints the name of every file it’s deleting.

This is particularly useful when deleting a directory with -r/--recursive, because it shows you the individual files that are being deleted:

$ python3 -m venv .venv

$ rm -rv .venv
.venv/bin/Activate.ps1
.venv/bin/python3
.venv/bin/pip3.13
.venv/bin/python
…