How to find the largest file in a directory and its subdirectories?

Question

We\'re just starting a UNIX class and are learning a variety of Bash commands. Our assignment involves performing various commands on a directory that has a number of folder

Answer 1

Try the following one-liner (display top-20 biggest files):

ls -1Rs | sed -e "s/^ *//" | grep "^[0-9]" | sort -nr | head -n20

or (human readable sizes):

ls -1Rhs | sed -e "s/^ *//" | grep "^[0-9]" | sort -hr | head -n20

Works fine under Linux/BSD/OSX in comparison to other answers, as find's -printf option doesn't exist on OSX/BSD and stat has different parameters depending on OS. However the second command to work on OSX/BSD properly (as sort doesn't have -h), install sort from coreutils or remove -h from ls and use sort -nr instead.

So these aliases are useful to have in your rc files:

alias big='du -ah . | sort -rh | head -20'
alias big-files='ls -1Rhs | sed -e "s/^ *//" | grep "^[0-9]" | sort -hr | head -n20'

Answer 2

du -aS /PATH/TO/folder | sort -rn | head -2 | tail -1

or

du -aS /PATH/TO/folder | sort -rn | awk 'NR==2'

Answer 3

Linux Solution: For example, you want to see all files/folder list of your home (/) directory according to file/folder size (Descending order).

sudo du -xm / | sort -rn | more

Answer 4

ls -alR|awk '{ if ($5 > max) {max=$5;ff=$9}} END {print max "\t" ff;}'

Answer 5

This script simplifies finding largest files for further action. I keep it in my ~/bin directory, and put ~/bin in my $PATH.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# scriptname: above
# author: Jonathan D. Lettvin, 201401220235

# This finds files of size >= $1 (format ${count}[K|M|G|T], default 10G)
# using a reliable version-independent bash hash to relax find's -size syntax.
# Specifying size using 'T' for Terabytes is supported.
# Output size has units (K|M|G|T) in the left hand output column.

# Example:
#   ubuntu12.04$ above 1T
#   128T /proc/core

# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1494178/how-to-define-hash-tables-in-bash
# Inspiration for hasch: thanks Adam Katz, Oct 18 2012 00:39
function hasch() { local hasch=`echo "$1" | cksum`; echo "${hasch//[!0-9]}"; }
function usage() { echo "Usage: $0 [{count}{k|K|m|M|g|G|t|T}"; exit 1; }
function arg1() {
    # Translate single arg (if present) into format usable by find.
    count=10; units=G;  # Default find -size argument to 10G.
    size=${count}${units}
    if [ -n "$1" ]; then
        for P in TT tT GG gG MM mM Kk kk; do xlat[`hasch ${P:0:1}`]="${P:1:1}"; done
        units=${xlat[`hasch ${1:(-1)}`]}; count=${1:0:(-1)}
        test -n "$units" || usage
        test -x $(echo "$count" | sed s/[0-9]//g) || usage
        if [ "$units" == "T" ]; then units="G"; let count=$count*1024; fi
        size=${count}${units}
    fi
}
function main() {
    sudo \
        find / -type f -size +$size -exec ls -lh {} \; 2>/dev/null | \
        awk '{ N=$5; fn=$9; for(i=10;i<=NF;i++){fn=fn" "$i};print N " " fn }'
}

arg1 $1
main $size

Answer 6

That is quite simpler way to do it:

ls -l | tr -s " " " " | cut -d " " -f 5,9 | sort -n -r | head -n 1***

And you'll get this: 8445 examples.desktop