If I run rm -rf * command under one parent directory.
/data > rm -rf *
Is there anyway to know which files will be deleted first ?
you can do
ls -ltr *
from that dir before deleting to get the listings of files and dirs which are going to be delete...
On wonders why you care. I would presume that it will be alphabetical and similar down the subdirectories. You can test this with ls -R
As an alternate, is /data a filesystem? If so and it is large with lots of files, you can probably speed up your operation by un-mounting it, reformatting it with a mkfs command and then re-mounting it.
Robin