How to find the largest directories or largest files?

Question

Under Linux, I'm looking for a command to list the largest file and/or the largest directories under a directory.

Answer 1

From any directory:

du -a | sort -n -r

Answer 2

A utility called ncdu will give you the information you are looking for.

sudo apt-get install ncdu

On OS X, it can be installed using Homebrew:

brew install ncdu

Answer 3

Following command shows you one level of directories and their sizes

du --max-depth=1 /path | sort -r -k1,1n

If one of them really sticks out (the last one on the list is the largest due to sort -r), then you re-run the command on that directory, and then keep going until you find the offending directory / file.

If all you want is the ten biggest files just do

find /home -type f -exec du -s {} \; | sort -r -k1,1n | head

Answer 4

du -sk * | sort -nr | head -1

This will show the biggest directory/file in a directory in KB. Changing the head value will result in the top x files/directories.

Answer 5

This post will help you well:

cd /path/to/some/where
du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10
du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -10

Answer 6

Following command will return top 10 biggest files from given /path

du -a -h /path | sort -h -r | head -n 10

I like to use -h options for readability. Both du and sort need to have -h.

Answer 7

Use

ls -A | xargs -I artifact du -ms artifact | sort -nr

Optionally, you can add a pipe and use head -5

Answer 8

Use du. Try this to order the result:

du | sort -n

Answer 9

Try the following one-liner (displays top-20 biggest files in the current directory):

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

or with human readable sizes:

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

The second command to work on OSX/BSD properly (as sort doesn't have -h), you need to install sort from coreutils.

So these aliases are useful to have in your rc files (every time when you need it):

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

Answer 10

du -sh /path * | sort -nr | grep G

G for GIG (to weed out smaller) files/directories