Find and list large files on Linux (or Unix, BSD, Mac OSX)

Written by Shanx July 24th, 2006

There are several ways to do this, the most prevalent among sys admins being this: find {/path/to/folder/} -type f -size +{size-in-kb}k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk ‘{ print [...]

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There are several ways to do this, the most prevalent among sys admins being this:

find {/path/to/folder/} -type f -size +{size-in-kb}k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }'

Which lists the largest files in the folder /path/to/folder. You could just use the ls command too, as such:

ls -lhS

But there is a simpler, more efficient method to do this:

du -xak .|sort -n|tail -50

But the best method involves a small Perl hack that shows a very neatly laid out listing of largest files:

du -k | sort -n | perl -ne 'if ( /^(\d+)\s+(.*$)/){$l=log($1+.1);$m=int($l/log(1024)); printf  ("%6.1f\t%s\t%25s  %s\n",($1/(2**(10*$m))),(("K","M","G","T","P")[$m]),"*"x (1.5*$l),$2);}'

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