UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,
How to find the list of 5 largest(size wise) file in current directory?i tried using

Code:

    ls -l | sort -t " " -r +5 -6 -n | head -5

but this is not giving correct output as ls -l command gives 1 extra line of output that is how many total files are there!so by running the above command i get that also in the output also there are directories and even though its size is displaying 0 but that also is coming in output. Thanks in advance!

Can check the switches in the ls man page to turn the total off, or use "grep -v total" to remove that line but you might have the problem that any line with a file or directory named "total" will be excluded too.
You can also pipe the ls into for example sed or awk to remove the 1st or last line, wherever the total is listed in your os/ls.

Something like this should do the job:

Code:

ls -l|sort -n -k 5,5|tail -5|awk '{print $9}'

If you have files with spaces you can add more fields with the print command of awk:

Code:

ls -l|sort -n -k 5,5|tail -5|awk '{print $9,$10,$11}'

Regards

to restrict to files in current dir only:

Code:

#  find * -prune -type f | xargs du -sk {}\; | sort -rn | sed 5q

should work

This should do as its very simple

du -a "dir" |sort -n -r|head -n 5