Comments on: Linux Find Large Files

By: Alastair

Alastair — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:05:46 +0000

Thanks! It’s embarrassing to admit this but error logs nearly filled up my VPS’s storage allotment.

By: Tom scott

Tom scott — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 02:13:48 +0000

How would i delete a directory that has gone above say 10GB?
-size shows differently for files and directories.

By: Warren

Warren — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 01:38:18 +0000

Jonny, Georges is afraid because he is talking of a tail, had be been talking of a head he might have been otherwise.

By: Jonny

Jonny — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:57:16 +0000

Why are you afraid?

By: Erwin

Erwin — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:20:11 +0000

super awesome ;)

By: skater

skater — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:07:52 +0000

My tips that put together some of the above

#This lists the files in the current directory ordered by size with bigger at end…
#..so you do not have to scroll up ;)
ls -alSr

#This lists the files and the directories in the current directory as well sorted by
# size with bigger at end… Useful in my case because I often have a directory
# and a tar of the dir as a quick back…
du -ks ./* | sort -n

bis
S

By: Pejman

Pejman — Mon, 23 May 2011 05:50:21 +0000

tnx to everyone. great sharing :)

here is the same command but has filter for just *.log files.
to find huge log files on linux:

find . -size +1000k -name *.log -print0 | xargs -0 ls –lSh

good luck.

By: Binu

Binu — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:10:09 +0000

find -size +50M -printf “%s %p\n”

‘man find’ will tell you other printf options.

By: gunjankapoor

gunjankapoor — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 05:31:09 +0000

To finds files = 50,000KB (50MB+) in size and display their names, along with size.
(The size should be exact).
What will be the command?

By: Albert

Albert — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:06:59 +0000

Hi everyone!!
i have a litle problem, i have this

find /home/dir -exec grep -H -w “op1″ {} \; | grep -w “op2″

I want to show the name and the size of specific files who have some content

ls -l (filename) | awk ‘{sum = sum + $5} END {print sum}’

i been trying put this together but no luck

By: Lesle Boyd

Lesle Boyd — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:17:56 +0000

You guys are the greatest!
I sure enjoyed reading this thread and the information is extremely useful in my job.
Thanks to all who posted. My head is swimming!

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:46:26 +0000

Jonathan,

That Perl one-liner is a work of art. Thank you for sharing it with the world!

By: Deepankar

Deepankar — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:56:04 +0000

Try
cd (directory path)
du -h | grep [0-9]G

This will list all files that are in GB.
Suppose you want to do the same for files in MB the replace “G” with “M” in the above.

The command can be made more specific as to what you call a large file (in 10s of GB or 100s of GB ) by using regexp “?” instead of “[0-9]“

By: Deepankar

Deepankar — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:53:33 +0000

Try
cd
du -h | grep [0-9]G

This will list all files that are in GB.
Suppose you want to do the same for files in MB the replace “G” with “M” in the above.

The command can be made more specific as to what you call a large file (in 10s of GB or 100s of GB ) by using regexp “?” instead of “[0-9]“

By: Keith White

Keith White — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:43:17 +0000

I find the following works rather well... du -xak . | sort -n | awk '{size=$1/1024; path=""; for (i=2; i 50) { printf("%dMb %s\n", size,path); } }' It lists all files or directories bigger than 50MB (just change size>50 to alter that) in the current directory (change the "." to a directory path to specify another one) in a friendly, human-readable way and happily plays with spaces (I used it on an NTFS mount in fact).

By: ronald kriwelz simanjuntak

ronald kriwelz simanjuntak — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:11:20 +0000

owh yes, i forgot to say that it will list all the files bigger than 10MB,since wut i ned is to list biggest files, and yeah ur addition to the command does the thing :)
or u can add “more” to the command
the power of command line, the beauty of linux :)

By: Scott Carlson

Scott Carlson — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:44:24 +0000

@ronald

Interesting. I dug a bit. My use case is find the largest files in a directory and not just those over 10M. So I had removed the size restriction, but the same problem occurs with a smaller size restriction. Even with “-size +100k” find was returning directories as well as files. This messed up the expected results as I previously saw.

So for me, this one works as expected.
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lSh | head -20

Thanks.

By: ronald kriwelz simanjuntak

ronald kriwelz simanjuntak — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:02:21 +0000

wut do you mean by it doesnt work across subdirectories ? i tried it on my ubuntu box and it show files in the subdirectories.
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 412M Jan 15 10:18 /var/lib/mysql/darta/namefile.MYD
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 173M Jun 9 2009 /var/lib/mysql/flyingfight/dbacomment.MYD
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 165M Jan 15 10:40 /var/lib/mysql/interndba/post.MYI
-rw-rw—- 1 mysql mysql 159M Jan 15 10:40 /var/lib/mysql/interndba/post.MYD
-rw——- 1 root root 105M Jan 10 03:31 /var/log/messages.1

those files are in different subdirectories right?

By: Scott Carlson

Scott Carlson — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:08:50 +0000

@ronald

Your find doesn’t work across subdirectories. It’s definitely very clean for a leaf directory though.

By: ronald kriwelz simanjuntak

ronald kriwelz simanjuntak — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:49:25 +0000

how bout using this :
find /var -size +10000k -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lSh

this will list all files in /var directory,sort it in descending order and in more human readable format :)