3 Ways to find the largest files in Linux

Updated: Aug 2

We can use the following commands to find the largest files and directories in #Linux.

Using Du Command to Find the Largest Files

Find Largest Files and Directories under a specific directory and subdirectory

# du -ah /home | sort -n -r | head -n 5

Find Largest Files and Directories under the current working directory and subdirectory

# du -ah | sort -n -r | head -n 5

Find Largest Directories or Files in the current working directory

# du -sh * | sort -rh | head -5

Find Largest Directories or Files in / directory

# du -ahx / | sort -rh | head -5

We use the following commands in our examples.

#du command : It estimates file space usage
sort command : Sort lines of text files or given input data
head command : Output the first part of files i.e. to display first 10 largest file

We use the following options in our examples.

#du command -h option : display file sizes in human-readable format, in Kilobytes, Megabytes and Gigabytes.
du command -s option : Show total for each argument.
du command -x option : Skip directories. (if on different file systems)
sort command -r option : Reverse the result of comparisons.
sort command -h option : Compare the numbers.
head command -10 OR -n 10 option : Displays the first 10 lines of the output.

ls -lSh /bin | head -5

find ./ -type f -exec du -sh {} \; |sort -h|tail -5

find / -size +100M -ls

find $DIRECTORY -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n | tail -n 5