Uncle google isn't helping with this one, perhaps my search terms are wrong.

Both of these two command variants print too much information. In some cases it's printing so many file names that it slows down the output. All I really need to see is the total number of files deleted (even if it's zero). Does anyone know if there's a way to do that with the RM command?

The 'v' (verbose) flag is what is causing the names to be printed. Just get rid of the 'v'.

Could you count the files in the directory before deleting them?

Something like:

Since the -r flag is also being used, rm will nuke subdirectories too. So to get an accurate count of actual FILES to be deleted, one could do this before the rm command:

find . -type f | wc -l

Cheers

When I tried it, it merely formats the filenames a little differently when I remove the V.

Weird, now trying it again, it seemed to NOT print the file names when I removed the V. Maybe it's due to different systems.

I'm doing all of this through the "Git Bash" prompt on some Windows systems, maybe the behavior differs.

Aha, I see my problem. Bad syntax, it was the echo command that was printing all the directories, not the RM command.

dir=/c/Users/afabris/Desktop/testfolder/*
echo Cleaning $dir;

That prints a list of the directories inside testfolder. Not sure why "dir" isn't just a string there, apparently that's an aspect of Bash that I didn't understand before.

A bash command line can look like this:

VARxyz=1234 command arg1 arg2 ...

So when you do this:

dir=/c/Users/afabris/Desktop/testfolder/*

You are really doing this:

dir=/c/Users/afabris/Desktop/testfolder/file1 /c/Users/afabris/Desktop/testfolder/file2 /c/Users/afabris/Desktop/testfolder/file3 ...

So.. "/c/Users/afabris/Desktop/testfolder/file2" is the "command" and "/c/Users/afabris/Desktop/testfolder/file3"... are the args..

Neat, eh!

Do this instead:

dir="/c/Users/afabris/Desktop/testfolder/*"