Finding all directories with Gigabyte space usage. Extracting the directory name from xargs and then again xargs to remove them.
du -d2 -h ~/Downloads/ | grep -E '[0-9]G' | xargs -I{} sh -c "echo {} | cut -d' ' -f2" | xargs rm -ri
I would like to interactively remove the directory, but I dont get a chance from the bash to enter my option.
You cannot answer interactively to rm -ri questions with the last piped xargs command: explanation here.
Instead, you can put the list of big directories as arguments to rm -ri:
rm -ri $(du -d2 -h ~/Downloads/* | grep -E '[0-9]G' | xargs -I{} sh -c "echo {} | cut -d' ' -f2")
Note that you can replace the xargs cut with awk as such:
rm -ri $(du -d2 -h ~/Downloads/* | grep -E '[0-9]G' | awk '{print $2}')
Or even shorter:
rm -ri $(du -d2 -h ~/Downloads/* | awk '$1 ~ /G$/ {print $2}')
Also note that the above commands won't work well if there are spaces in the filenames.
{ print $2 } will print a partial path if the pathname contain spaces.
rm -ri $() won't work if the pathnames have spaces. And in fact, the original command in the question wouldn't work either due to the cut command. Updating answer.
It looks like there is indeed a method to delete directories interactively using xargs. After reading the man pages, I myself came out with a solution.
The -p option along with -n 1 option solves the problem.
du -d2 -h ~/Downloads/* | grep -E '[0-9]G' | xargs -I{} sh -c "echo {} | cut -d' ' -f2" | xargs -p -n1 rm -r
