Home / server / Questions / 437581
Accepted
denormalizer
Asked: 2012-10-12 18:00:38 +0800 CST

How to find largest files in a dir - ignoring directory sizes

  • 772

I want to do something like this

du -a | sort -rn | head

But I want to extract files only, ignoring directories.

To be clear, I want to traverse through all sub-directories but I don't want to find directory sizes. Just files sizes.

UPDATE

I also want to return the full path of the files

linux

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This should work:

    find <path> -type f -exec du -a{} + | sort -rn | head

    Taken from http://unix-linux.itags.org/q_unix-linux-programming_84920.html

    • 6

  2. One way to find the largest file in a directory:

    find . -type f | xargs ls -1S | head -n 1
    • 2

  3. I just want to add my solution although it's not as complete as the one by @Michael Plotke

    ls -lR | egrep "^-" | awk '{ print $5, "\t", $8 }' | sort -rn | head

    UPDATE 1

    I've now had to use this script on BSD unix (which I did not originally intended to do) and found Michael's solution doesn't work.

    By incorporating @steve's solution into mine, this solution is more usable on BSD systems:

    find . -type f | xargs ls -lS | awk '{ print $5, "\t", $9 }' | head

    UPDATE 2

    Further refinement. Resolves issues with unusual filenames (eg. spaces)

    find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lS | awk '{ print $5, "\t", $9 }' | head

    Note: I found this solution to be significantly faster on WSL (windows subsystem Linux) than the accepted solution.

    In a directory with about 1000 files, this solution takes seconds whereas the accepted answer took tens of minutes.

    • 1