Linux find big folder

How to Find Out Top Directories and Files (Disk Space) in Linux

As a Linux administrator, you must periodically check which files and folders are consuming more disk space. It is very necessary to find unnecessary junk and free up them from your hard disk.

This brief tutorial describes how to find the largest files and folders in the Linux file system using du (disk usage) and find command. If you want to learn more about these two commands, then head over to the following articles.

How to Find Biggest Files and Directories in Linux

Run the following command to find out top biggest directories under /home partition.

Find Largest Directories in Linux

The above command displays the biggest 5 directories of my /home partition.

Find Largest Directories in Linux

If you want to display the biggest directories in the current working directory, run:

Find Biggest Directories Only

Let us break down the command and see what says each parameter.

1. du command: Estimate file space usage.
2. a : Displays all files and folders.
3. sort command : Sort lines of text files.
4. -n : Compare according to string numerical value.
5. -r : Reverse the result of comparisons.
6. head : Output the first part of files.
7. -n : Print the first ‘n’ lines. (In our case, We displayed the first 5 lines).

Some of you would like to display the above result in human-readable format. i.e you might want to display the largest files in KB, MB, or GB.

Find Top Directories Sizes in Linux

The above command will show the top directories, which are eating up more disk space. If you feel that some directories are not important, you can simply delete a few sub-directories or delete the entire folder to free up some space.

To display the largest folders/files including the sub-directories, run:

Find Largest Folder and Subdirectories

Find out the meaning of each option using in above command:

1. du command: Estimate file space usage.
2. -h : Print sizes in human-readable format (e.g., 10MB).
3. -S : Do not include the size of subdirectories.
4. -s : Display only a total for each argument.
5. sort command : sort lines of text files.
6. -r : Reverse the result of comparisons.
7. -h : Compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K, 1G).
8. head : Output the first part of files.

Find Out Top File Sizes Only

If you want to display the biggest file sizes only, then run the following command:

Find Top File Sizes in Linux

To find the largest files in a particular location, just include the path beside the find command:

Find Top File Size in Specific Location

The above command will display the largest file from /home/tecmint/Downloads directory.

That’s all for now. Finding the biggest files and folders is no big deal. Even a novice administrator can easily find them. If you find this tutorial useful, please share it on your social networks and support TecMint.

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Linux find largest file in directory recursively using find/du

I have 500GB SSD installed on my Linux server. My web server is running out of the disk space. I need to find a biggest or largest file concerning file size on the disk. How do I find largest file in a directory recursively using the find command?

To find a big file concerning file size on disk is easy task if you know how to use the find, du and other command. The du command used to estimate file space usage on Linux system. The output of du passed on to the sort and head command using shell pipes. Let us see how to find largest file in Linux server using various commands.

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	Linux
Est. reading time	3 minutes

Linux find largest file in directory recursively using find

The procedure to find largest files including directories in Linux is as follows:

1. Open the terminal application
2. Login as root user using the sudo -i command
3. Type du -a /dir/ | sort -n -r | head -n 20
4. du will estimate file space usage
5. sort will sort out the output of du command
6. head will only show top 20 largest file in /dir/

Linux find a biggest files in /

Linux find large files quickly with bash alias

One can hunt down disk space hogs with ducks bash shell alias

How To Find Largest Top 10 Files and Directories On Linux / UNIX / BSD

Finding largest file recursively on Linux bash shell using find

One can only list files and skip the directories with the find command instead of using the du command, sort command and head command combination:
$ sudo find / -type f -printf «%s\t%p\n» | sort -n | tail -1
$ find $HOME -type f -printf ‘%s %p\n’ | sort -nr | head -10
Here is what I got on my systems:

Where, find command options are as follows:

• $HOME – Directory search for files.
• -type f – Search for regular files only.
• -printf ‘%s %p\n’ – Force find to use print format on the scren, interpreting \ escapes and % directives. The %s will print file’s size in bytes. Show file name using %p . This speailized output makes it easy to sort out file names using the sort command.

The -n is for numeric sort and the -r passed to sort will reverse the result of comparisons. The head command is used to control and show the first part of files. In other words, only display the top 10 results from previous commands.

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Great! I found the largest files on my disk. What next?

Depend upon file/dir type you can either move or delete the file. For example, you cannot remove or move the Linux kernel or diver directories. To delete unwanted file on Linux use the rm command:
rm -i -v /path/to/file
To get rid of all files and its sub-directories recursively use following command:
rm -rf /path/to/folderName
To move file to a usb pen mounted at /mnt/usb/, run the mv command:
mv /path/to/large/file/ /mnt/usb/

Conclusion

You just learned how to search, find and list largest or biggest directories/files in Linux using the combination of du/find and other commands. For more info see this page or man pages of du and find commands:
man du
man find
man sort
man head
man tail

🐧 Get the latest tutorials on Linux, Open Source & DevOps via

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How To: Linux Find Large Files in a Directory

H ow do I find out all large files in a directory?

There is no single command that can be used to list all large files. But, with the help of find command command and shell pipes, you can easily list all large files. This page explains how to find the largest files and directories in Linux using various commands.

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	Yes
Requirements	Find and du commands on Linux or Unix
Est. reading time	4 minutes

Linux List All Large Files

To finds all files over 50,000KB (50MB+) in size and display their names, along with size, use following syntax:

The syntax may vary based upon GNU/find and your Linux distro. Hence read man pages.

Syntax for RedHat / CentOS / Fedora Linux

find -type f -size +k -exec ls -lh <> \; | awk ‘< print $9 ": " $5 >‘
Search or find big files Linux (50MB) in current directory, enter:
$ find . -type f -size +50000k -exec ls -lh <> \; | awk ‘< print $9 ": " $5 >‘
Search in my /var/log directory:
# find /var/log -type f -size +100000k -exec ls -lh <> \; | awk ‘< print $9 ": " $5 >‘

Syntax for Debian / Ubuntu Linux

find -type f -size +k -exec ls -lh <> \; | awk ‘< print $8 ": " $5 >‘
Search in current directory:
$ find . -type f -size +10000k -exec ls -lh <> \; | awk ‘< print $8 ": " $5 >‘
Sample output:

Above commands will lists files that are are greater than 10,000 kilobytes in size. To list all files in your home directory tree less than 500 bytes in size, type:
$ find $HOME -size -500b
OR
$ find

-size -500b
To list all files on the system whose size is exactly 20 512-byte blocks, type:
# find / -size 20

Finding large files using the find command

Let us search for files with size greater than 1000 MB, run

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Finding the Biggest Files and Folders in Linux Command Line

This is a quick tutorial to show you how to find the biggest files on your Linux machine using a few commands that you may already be familiar with du, sort, and head.

Here’s a quick summary:

To find the 10 biggest folders in current directory:

To find the 10 biggest files and folders in current directory:

Read the rest of the article to get a detailed explanation of these commands.

How to find the biggest folders in Linux?

The du command is used for getting the disk usage. Sort command sorts the data as per your requirement. The head command displays the top lines of a text input source.

This is just one combination for getting the biggest files and directories in Linux command line. There can be several other ways to achieve the same result.

What happens if you run these three commands together without options? Your output probably won’t be very useful.

When you run these commands, unless specified with du, everything will run automatically using the current working directory as the source file.

Sort without options arranges items in numerical order, but this behavior is a little strange. 100 is considered less than 12 because 2 > 0. That’s definitely not what we want.

Head here defaults to displaying the first 10 items. Depending on the directory you want to analyze, you can tailor this to find large files quickly.

Adding Options

So let’s look at what might be more typical options.

Adding -n to sort command means that items will be sorted by numeric value. Adding -r means that the results will be reversed. This is what we want when searching for the largest number.

I’m also going to add -5 to limit our results further than the default for head. This value is something that you should decide based on what you know about the system.

You may want to expand the value to a number greater than 10, or omit it entirely if there are many large files you are trying to filter. Otherwise, you may run it, delete several files, but still have space issues.

Okay, let’s put it all together and see what happens.

That’s better, you can quickly see where the largest files are. You can do better, though. Let’s clean it up with some more options.

Human-Readable Output

The human options for certain commands help present numbers in a way that is familiar to us. Let’s try adding that to the du command.

Corrected Human-Readble Output

Wait a second… Those numbers don’t make any sense. No, they don’t because You have only changed the content to human-readable for the du command. Sort has its own built-in function for human-readable numeric sort with -h. Both must be used to get the desired output. You can run into these kinds of issues often in Linux.

It’s important to experiment and make sure that your results “make sense” before using a command a specific way.

Let’s try it again.

That’s more like it.

Where are the largest files?

You can tell from the output that the Documents folder contains some larger files, but if you switch to that folder and run our command again, you don’t get the largest file. You get this:

This is just telling us what you already know. The current directory, referred to as . , has 1.7G worth of files. That isn’t helpful if you’re trying to find single, unusually large files.

You need to add another flag to du for this task. Using option -a, you can get the output that we’re looking for. Let’s try it.

Conclusion

Did you enjoy this guide to finding large files in Linux? I hope all of these tips taught you something new.

If you like this guide, please share it on social media. If you have any comments or questions, leave them below.

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