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!
Want to read Linux tips and tricks, but don't have time to check our blog everyday? Subscribe to our daily email newsletter to make sure you don't miss a single tip/tricks. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here!
- Email FAQ to a friend
- Printable version
- Rss Feed
- Last Updated: 6-13-07
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Great, but what if I only want the largest files and not the directories?
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
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.
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
“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.
This does not work.
# du -ha /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10″
as Joe says this ignores files over 1gb
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);}' | headHuman readable version:
for X in $(du -s * | sort -nr | cut -f 2); do du -hs $X ; done
If you set du to human readable I think it will not sort the way you really want.
For the above problems. I would like to find a way to list only the last level directories’ sizes.
(I want to filter somehow this:
/home
/home/user
/home/user/mail
I just want to see the lasts of the tree!)
TIA!
–
R
this is what i use.
for i in G M K; do du -ah | grep [0-9]$i | sort -nr -k 1; done | head -n 11find . -type f -print0| xargs -0 ls -s | sort -rn | awk ‘{size=$1/1024; printf(”%dMb %s\n”, size,$2);}’ | head
! -print0 for filenames with spaces …
(and xargs -0 combined)
No wonder windows rule
Winfan, I read this page wondering how to do these things in Windows — can you post instructions? Thanks!
thanks !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
great job !!!!!!!!!!!