How to find the largest file in a directory and its subdirectories

Question

We re just starting a UNIX class and are learning a variety of Bash commands  Our assignment involves performing various commands on a directory that has a number of folders under it as well    I know how to list and count all the regular files from the root folder using    find   -type l   wc -l   But I d like to know where to go from there in order to find the largest file in the whole directory  I ve seen somethings regarding a du command  but we haven t learned that  so in the repertoire of things we ve learned I assume we need to somehow connect it to the ls -t command   And pardon me if my  lingo  isn t correct  I m still getting used to it

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Linux Solution  For example  you want to see all files folder list of your home     directory according to file folder size  Descending order    sudo du -xm     sort -rn   more

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du -aS  PATH TO folder   sort -rn   head -2   tail -1  or  du -aS  PATH TO folder   sort -rn   awk  NR  2

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To list the larger file in a folder   ls -sh  pathFolder   sort -rh   head -n 1   The output of ls -sh is a sized s and human h understandable view of the file size number    You could use ls -shS  pathFolder   head -n 1  The bigger S from ls already order the list from the larger files to the smaller ones but the first result its the sum of all files in that folder  So if you want just to list the bigger file  one file  you need to head -n 2 and check at the  second line result  or use the first example with ls sort head

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This lists files recursively if they re normal files  sorts by the 7th field  which is size in my find output  check yours   and shows just the first file   find   -type f -ls   sort  7   head -1   The first option to find is the start path for the recursive search   A -type of f searches for normal files   Note that if you try to parse this as a filename  you may fail if the filename contains spaces  newlines or other special characters   The options to sort also vary by operating system   I m using FreeBSD   A  better  but more complex and heavier solution would be to have find traverse the directories  but perhaps use stat to get the details about the file  then perhaps use awk to find the largest size   Note that the output of stat also depends on your operating system

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This script simplifies finding largest files for further action  I keep it in my   bin directory  and put   bin in my  PATH      usr bin env bash   scriptname  above   author  Jonathan D  Lettvin  201401220235    This finds files of size  gt    1  format   count  K M G T   default 10G    using a reliable version-independent bash hash to relax find s -size syntax    Specifying size using  T  for Terabytes is supported    Output size has units  K M G T  in the left hand output column     Example      ubuntu12 04  above 1T     128T  proc core    http   stackoverflow com questions 1494178 how-to-define-hash-tables-in-bash   Inspiration for hasch  thanks Adam Katz  Oct 18 2012 00 39 function hasch     local hasch  echo   1    cksum   echo    hasch    0-9       function usage     echo  Usage   0   count  k K m M g G t T    exit 1    function arg1           Translate single arg  if present  into format usable by find      count 10  units G     Default find -size argument to 10G      size   count   units      if   -n   1     then         for P in TT tT GG gG MM mM Kk kk  do xlat  hasch   P 0 1       P 1 1    done         units   xlat  hasch   1  -1       count   1 0  -1           test -n   units     usage         test -x   echo   count    sed s  0-9   g     usage         if     units      T     then units  G   let count  count 1024  fi         size   count   units      fi   function main         sudo           find   -type f -size   size -exec ls -lh       2 gt  dev null             awk    N  5  fn  9  for i 10 i lt  NF i    fn fn    i  print N     fn       arg1  1 main  size

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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 -a  var   sort -n -r   head -n 10   If you want more human readable output try     cd  path to some var   du -hsx     sort -rh   head -10   Where    Var is the directory you wan to search du command -h option   display sizes in human readable format  e g   1K  234M  2G    du command -s option   show only a total for each argument  summary    du command -x option   skip directories on different file systems   sort command -r option   reverse the result of comparisons   sort command -h option   compare human readable numbers  This is GNU sort specific option only   head command -10 OR -n 10 option   show the first 10 lines

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To find the top 25 files in the current directory and its subdirectories   find   -type f -exec ls -al         sort -nr -k5   head -n 25  This will output the top 25 files by sorting based on the size of the files via the  sort -nr -k5  piped command   Same but with human-readable file sizes   find   -type f -exec ls -alh         sort -hr -k5   head -n 25

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That is quite simpler way to do it   ls -l   tr -s           cut -d     -f 5 9   sort -n -r   head -n 1      And you ll get this  8445 examples desktop

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On Solaris I use   find   -type f -ls sort -nr -k7 awk  NR  1 print  7  11    formatted   or  find   -type f -ls   sort -nrk7   head -1  unformatted   because anything else posted here didn t work  This will find the largest file in  PWD and subdirectories

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ls -alR awk    if   5  gt  max   max  5 ff  9   END  print max   t  ff

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Try the following one-liner  display top-20 biggest files    ls -1Rs   sed -e  s          grep    0-9     sort -nr   head -n20   or  human readable sizes    ls -1Rhs   sed -e  s          grep    0-9     sort -hr   head -n20      Works fine under Linux BSD OSX in comparison to other answers  as find s -printf option doesn t exist on OSX BSD and stat has different parameters depending on OS  However the second command to work on OSX BSD properly  as sort doesn t have -h   install sort from coreutils or remove -h from ls and use sort -nr instead    So these aliases are useful to have in your rc files   alias big  du -ah     sort -rh   head -20  alias big-files  ls -1Rhs   sed -e  s          grep    0-9     sort -hr   head -n20

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Quote from this link-     If you want to find and print the top 10 largest files names  not   directories  in a particular directory and its sub directories        find   -printf   s  p n  sort -nr head      To restrict the search to the present directory use  -maxdepth 1  with   find         find   -maxdepth 1 -printf   s  p n  sort -nr head      And to print the top 10 largest  files and directories          du -a     sort -nr   head         Use  head -n X  instead of the only  head  above to print the top X largest files  in all the above examples

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find   -type f   xargs ls -lS   head -n 1   outputs  -rw-r--r--  1 nneonneo  staff  9274991 Apr 11 02 29   devel misc test out   If you just want the filename   find   -type f   xargs ls -1S   head -n 1   This avoids using awk and allows you to use whatever flags you want in ls   Caveat  Because xargs tries to avoid building overlong command lines  this might fail if you run it on a directory with a lot of files because ls ends up executing more than once  It s not an insurmountable problem  you can collect the head -n 1 output from each ls invocation  and run ls -S again  looping until you have a single file   but it does mar this approach somewhat

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This will find the largest file or folder in your present working directory   ls -S  path to folder   head -1   To find the largest file in all sub-directories   find  path to folder -type f -exec ls -s         sort -nr   awk  NR  1    1     sub            print

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Try following command    find  your path -printf   k  p n    sort -g -k 1 1   awk   if  1  gt  500000  print  1 1024  MB       2     tail -n 1    This will print the largest file name and size and more than 500M  You can move the if  1  gt  500000  and it will print the largest file in the directory

[file] How to find the largest file in a directory and its subdirectories?

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