Best way to find largest files in a directory

Pouchie1 · #1 (**permalink**) 09-23-2009

What is the best way to find the largest files in a directory? I used du -k|sort -rn |less.

I got a results for this. But if I used the following command , I got another result...a different order in the same directory. Why is that?

ls -la |awk '{print $5," ",$9}' sort -rn|less. I saw that this command takes into consideration the zip file while du does not.

Thanks,

daPeach · #2 (**permalink**) 09-23-2009

simply

Code:

ls -S | head -1

thegeek · #3 (**permalink**) 09-23-2009

Different ways has different advantages & disadvantages such as some of the above will not go recursively, and some of them will not consider files and show only dirs.

To overcome all those, use find command as

Code:

find . -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n -r | head -5

I hope you can understand the above, if need to simple edits to fit your need.

Let us know, does this helped !

methyl · #4 (**permalink**) 09-24-2009

Quote:

ls -la |awk '{print $5," ",$9}' sort -rn|less

You probably want "ls -l" rather than "ls -la" to avoid processing "." and "..".
Also, because you have sorted with the highest at the top (-r) you probably want "more" not "less". On my system the sort "-n" (numeric) switch needs to be before the "-r" reverse switch. Also, there is a pipe missing in your command line.

Try:

Quote:

ls -l |awk '{print $5," ",$9}' | sort -n -r | more

arunkumar_mca · #5 (**permalink**) 09-24-2009

there is also a simple way to find the largest file

Code:

  ls -lrt | sort +4n | tail

HTML Code:

  ls -lrt  -- will sort the file based on list and recent time modified
  sort +4n  -- will sort the ls -lrt output based on the column 4 which is size
  tail -- will give you the last 10 lines , if you use tail -1 then you will 
                    get the largest file alone

Thanks
Arun

Pouchie1 · #6 (**permalink**) 4 Weeks Ago

Thanks very much everybody. The help is much appreciated.

proactiveaditya · #7 (**permalink**) 4 Weeks Ago

Linux Find Large Files

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