UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

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,

simply

Code:

ls -S | head -1

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 !

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:

there is also a simple way to find the largest file

Code:

  ls -lrt | sort +4n | tail

Thanks
Arun

Thanks very much everybody. The help is much appreciated.