3 Ways to find largest files in Linux

In this blog post, we will discuss three different ways to find the largest files on a Linux system. This is a handy trick to know if you are running out of disk space and need to free up some space.

We will be using the “du” command, the “find” command, and the “ls” command to find the largest files. Let’s get started!

The following commands can be used to find the largest files.

find /path/to/directory -type f -exec du -hs {} \;| sort -rh | head -n 1
du -sh * | sort -rh | head -1
ls -lSh /bin | head -1
find ./ -type f -exec du -sh {} \; |sort -h|tail -1
du -ah /home | sort -h -r | head -n 1
find $directory -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n | tail -n 1

Table of Contents

Find the Largest Files with find command in Linux

You can easily find the largest files in Linux using this command.

find /path/to/directory -type f -exec du -hs {} \;| sort -rh | head -n 1

This command will list all the files in the specified directory and print out the size of each file in human-readable format. It then sorts the output by file size to find the largest files.

The find command in Linux is a command line utility for walking a file hierarchy. It can be used to find files and directories and perform subsequent operations on them.

It supports searching by file, folder, name, modification date, owner and permissions. By using the ‘-exec’ other Linux commands can be executed on files or folders found.

Let’s break down the command:

find /path/to/directory -type f -exec du -hs {} \;| sort -rh | head -n 1

Command	Description
find /path/to/directory -type f	List all the files under the specified directory and subdirectories
du -sh	Display file size in human-readable format
sort -rh	Reverse the result based on human-readable numbers
head -1	Display the first largest file

If you want to find the largest files on the entire system, you can use the following command:

find / -type f -exec du -hs {} \; | sort -rh | head -n 1

This command will take a long time if you have many files on your server.

For instance, if you want to find the largest file in the directory /home/user/documents, you can run:

find /home/user/documents -type f -exec du -hs {} \; | sort -rh | head -n 1

It will list all the files within that directory and its subdirectories, calculate their sizes, sort them in descending order, and display the information of the largest file.

Sample output:

2.5G /home/user/documents/large_file.txt

In this example, /home/user/documents/large_file.txt is the largest file within the specified directory, with a size of 2.5 gigabytes.

Here are more examples.

Find the largest files under the current directory including sub directory

find ./ -type f -exec du -sh {} \; |sort -rh|head -n 1

Find the largest directory under the current directory

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -exec du -hs {} \;| sort -rh | head -n 1

Find the Largest Files with du command in Linux

The du command is used to estimate the space used by a file or directory. We can pipe the output of the du command to the sort command to sort the files by size. Then use the head command to print the first few lines of the output.

du -sh * | sort -rh | head -1

Open the terminal and type this command. It will list the largest files and directories under the current directory.

We use the following commands in our examples.

Command	Description
du -sh	Display file and directory size in human-readable format
sort -rh	Reverse the result based on human-readable numbers
head -1	Display the first largest files

This command is pretty useful when you need to find out which file or directory uses the most disk space under one specific directory.

For example, if we need to get the largest files under /etc directory, we can run the following commands.

cd /etc/ du -sh * | sort -rh | head -1

du -h -d 1 /etc/ | sort -rh | head -1

The commands du -sh * | sort -rh | head -1 and find ./ -type f -exec du -sh {} \; | sort -rh | head -n 1 serve a similar purpose of finding the largest file in a directory, but they differ in their approach.

du -sh * | sort -rh | head -1:

This command uses the du command to calculate the disk usage of each file and directory in the current directory (*).
The du -sh * part lists the disk usage of each file and directory in a human-readable format.
The output is then piped to sort -rh to sort the results in reverse order based on human-readable sizes.
Finally, head -1 displays only the first line, which represents the largest file or directory.

find ./ -type f -exec du -sh {} \; | sort -rh | head -n 1:

This command uses the find command to locate all regular files (-type f) starting from the current directory (./).
The -exec du -sh {} \; part executes the du command on each file found and displays the disk usage in human-readable format.
The output is then piped to sort -rh to sort the results in reverse order based on human-readable sizes.
Finally, head -n 1 displays only the first line, which represents the largest file.

Both commands achieve the same goal of finding the largest file, but they differ in how they generate the file list. The first command (du -sh *) includes all files and directories in the current directory, while the second command (find ./ -type f) specifically focuses on regular files within the current directory and its subdirectories.

Choose the appropriate command based on your requirements and the specific context of the task at hand.

Find the Largest Files with ls command in Linux

The ls command is one of the most basic commands in Linux, and it is used to list the contents of a directory.

By default, the ls command sorts files alphabetically, but you can also use it to sort files by size, by date, or by other attributes.

When encountering issues or errors related to a specific directory, checking the largest files can help pinpoint potential problem areas. By reviewing the largest files, you might identify corrupted files, log files that have grown too large, or unexpected file sizes that could be causing the issue.

If you want to see the human readable form of file sizes, you can use the -lhS option. This will show you the files in a long list format and sort them by human readable file size.

For example, we can use the following command to get the 5 largest files under /bin directory.

ls -lSh /bin | head -1

If you want to see the reverse order of file sizes, you can use the -lrhS option. This will show you the files in a long list format and sort them by reverse order of file size.

Command	Description
find / -type f -exec du -hs {} ; \| sort -rh \| head -n 1	Finds all regular files starting from the root directory (“/”), calculates the disk usage for each file, sorts them in reverse order based on human-readable sizes, and displays the information of the largest file.
ls -lSh /path/to/directory \| head -1	Lists the files and directories in the specified directory (“/path/to/directory”), displays detailed file information in long format, sorts them by size in descending order, and shows only the information of the largest file or directory
du -sh * \| sort -rh \| head -1	Calculates the disk usage of all files and directories in the current directory, displays the sizes in human-readable format, sorts them in reverse order based on size, and shows only the information of the largest file or directory

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