How do I find the largest top 10 files and directories on a Linux / UNIX / BSD filesystem?
Sometime it is necessary to find out what file(s) or directories is eating up all disk space. Further it may be necessary to find out it at particular location such as /tmp or /var or /home etc.
There is no simple command available to find out the largest files/directories on a Linux/UNIX/BSD filesystem. However, combination of following three commands (using pipes) you can easily find out list of largest files:
- du : Estimate file space usage
- sort : Sort lines of text files or given input data
- head : Output the first part of files i.e. to display first 10 largest file
Here is what you need to type at shell prompt to find out top 10 largest file/directories is taking up the most space in a /var directory/file system:
# du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10
Output:
1008372 /var 313236 /var/www 253964 /var/log 192544 /var/lib 152628 /var/spool 152508 /var/spool/squid 136524 /var/spool/squid/00 95736 /var/log/mrtg.log 74688 /var/log/squid 62544 /var/cache
If you want more human readable output try:
# du -ks /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10
Where,
- -a : Include all files, not just directories (du command)
- -h : Human readable format
- -n : Numeric sort (sort command)
- -r : Reverse the result of comparisons (sort command)
- -n 10 : Display 10 largest file. If you want 20 largest file replace 10 with 20. (head command)
Updated for accuracy!
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Discussion on This FAQ
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April 12th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Great, but what if I only want the largest files and not the directories?
April 12th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
To find out largest file only use command ls as follows in current directory:
ls -lSh . | head -5
Output:
-rw-r–r– 1 vivek vivek 267M 2004-08-04 15:37 WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe
-rw-r–r– 1 vivek vivek 96M 2005-12-30 14:03 VMware-workstation-5.5.1-19175.tar.gz
ls -lSh /bin | head -5
You can also use find command but not du:
find /var -type f -ls | sort -k 7 -r -n | head -10
Hope this helps
April 12th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
And yes to find the smallest files use command:
ls -lSr /var
Or use find command with -size flag.
find / -type f -size +20000k -exec ls -lh {} ; | awk ‘{ print $8 “: ” $5 }’
Read man page of find for more info.
January 19th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
How do I can list all the files in several directories and at the end write the totat of all the files and directories.I’m using the du command as fallow:
du -sh /public/base/sites/F*/*20070115*
this command give me the size of all the files but not the global total.
can somebody help me. please write me. john_fernandez@verizon.com.do
January 23rd, 2007 at 12:49 am
“If you want more human readable output try:
# du -ha /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10″
Im pretty sure that this will put 999kb above 1gb so I don’t think that this works.
April 17th, 2007 at 7:26 am
This does not work.
# du -ha /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10″
as Joe says this ignores files over 1gb
May 27th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
You could try this, gives a human readable output in MB
find . -type f | xargs ls -s | sort -rn | awk '{size=$1/1024; printf("%dMb %s\n", size,$2);}' | headSeptember 26th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Human readable version:
for X in $(du -s * | sort -nr | cut -f 2); do du -hs $X ; done
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm
If you set du to human readable I think it will not sort the way you really want.
For the above problems. I would like to find a way to list only the last level directories’ sizes.
(I want to filter somehow this:
/home
/home/user
/home/user/mail
I just want to see the lasts of the tree!)
TIA!
–
R
June 11th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
this is what i use.
for i in G M K; do du -ah | grep [0-9]$i | sort -nr -k 1; done | head -n 11