Find the largest files and directories in Linux
Here is a handy little list of command lines for Linux to find out which files and directories take up the most space, just to clean up. So, find the largest files and directories in linux with these commands.
Replace / home / manu with the directory of your choice. Don’t worry afterwards if it takes a little while.
du -hms / home / manu / * | sort -nr | head
There are other command I found out after searching a while. These are:
Find Command to find the largest files and directories
o search for files with size greater than 50 MB, in the current working directory , you would run the following command:
$ sudo find . -xdev -type f -size +50M
As output, this command will show a list of files without any additional information. Though path will be mentioned.
We can also use
find command in combination with the the tools/command like
sort to perform operations on those files.
In the example below, we are going to pass the output of the
find command to
ls that will print the size of each found file and then pipe that output to the
sort command to sort it based on the 5th column which is the file size.
find . -xdev -type f -size +50M -print | xargs ls -lh | sort -k5,5 -h -r
The output will look something like this:
-rw------- 1 root root 40967M Jan 5 14:12 /var/lib/libvirt/images/win10.qcow2
-rw------- 1 root root 3725M Jan 7 22:12 /var/lib/libvirt/images/debian-9_default.img
-rw------- 1 root root 1524M Dec 30 07:46 /var/lib/libvirt/images/centos-7-desktop_default.img
-rw------- 1 root root 999M Jan 5 14:43 /var/lib/libvirt/images/ubuntu-18-04-desktop_default.img
-rw------- 1 root root 562M Dec 31 07:38 /var/lib/libvirt/images/centos-7_default.img
-rw------- 1 root root 378M Jan 7 22:26 /var/lib/libvirt/images/bionic64_default.img
If the output contains a lot of lines of information you can use the
head command to print only the first 10 lines:
find . -xdev -type f -size +50M -print | xargs ls -lh | sort -k5,5 -h -r | head
Have a look at these too: