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How do I find the largest top 10 files and directories on a Linux / UNIX / BSD filesystem?

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: June 13, 2007]

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

  1. Anonymous Says:

    Great, but what if I only want the largest files and not the directories?

  2. nixcraft Says:

    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

  3. nixcraft Says:

    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.

  4. john Says:

    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

  5. Joe Says:

    “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.

  6. ChrisMM Says:

    This does not work.

    # du -ha /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10″

    as Joe says this ignores files over 1gb

  7. Dreyser Says:

    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);}' | head

  8. Benjamin Schmidt Says:

    Human readable version:

    for X in $(du -s * | sort -nr | cut -f 2); do du -hs $X ; done

  9. RudyD Says:

    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

  10. yanokwa Says:

    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

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