UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Use "du -h", it will report the size in a human readable form.

However, this will make the sort a bit more complex.

To maintain the sort as it is, use "du -k" which reports in kbytes instead of blocks, meaning the output numbers will be half as big.

I'm not sure if I should start a new thread so if I'm posting inappropriately apologies.

Is there a way to get du -k * | sort -rn | head -11, which I prefer for some reason to the find above to recurse?

eg
if I have a file test.txt in . and dirb of the same size the above will report;
65100 test.txt
....
65100 dirb
...

I like the output of the find but find it to be more system intensive than the straight du but if I can't get du to work the same way I'll start to use it instead.

if you use "-type f" in the "find" command as posted earlier, it shouldn't bring up directories.

Ah my bad I wasn't clear enough

with the -f limiting it to file names I get with the find , find $dir -type f -exec du -k {} \; 2>>/dev/null | sort -rn | head -${hd}

the following

480056 /somedir/test.txt
98911 /anotherdir/anotherfile.sh

Whereas with du -ks * | sort -rn |head -10 where I would prefer the same as the find above with the directories.
22016 temp_file
40000 bin ( a directory)

However while working out how to stop find recursing directories I answered my own question.

du -k * | sort -rn | head -10 gives the same answer as the find.


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