How can I sort all files by size in a directory?

Question

How can I display the files in a unix directory sorted by their human readable size, going from largest to smallest?

I tried

du -h | sort -V -k 1 

but it does not seem to work.

Answer 1

ls(1) /sort:

-S     sort by file size

Answer 2

$ ls -lhS

---

-l     use a long listing format
-h     with -l, print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
-S     sort by file size

Answer 3

If you have the appropriate sort version you may simply use:

du -h | sort -rh

mine is

$ sort --version
sort (GNU coreutils) 8.12

Answer 4

du -ha | sort -h

du : estimate file disk usage.

-h : for human
-a : all files

sort : sort lines of text.

-h : for human

man du; man sort for more. It works for me on ubuntu v15.

Answer 5

ls -S wasn't an option on the OS for me. The following worked:
ls -l | sort -k 5nr
They "key" was to specify the column to sort (get it, the "key"). Above I'm specifying -k 5nr meaning sort on 5th column which is size (5) evaluated as a number (n) in descending order (n)

Reference sort documentation for more information

Answer 6

I got this to work for me:

ls -l | sort -g -k 5 -r

Which (I just figured-out) is the same as:

ls -lS

Answer 7

Unlike ls -S, this will properly handle sparse files:

ls -lsh | sort -n | sed 's/^[0-9 ]* //'