How to list the size of each file and directory and sort by descending size in Bash

Question

I found that there is no easy to get way the size of a directory in Bash   I want that when I type ls - lt some options gt   it can list of all the sum of the file size of directory recursively and files at the same time and sort by size order   Is that possible

User · Answer

Apparently --max-depth option is not in Mac OS X s version of the du command  You can use the following instead   du -h -d 1   sort -n

User · Answer

Command  du -h --max-depth 0     sort -hr   Output  3 5M    asdf 6000 gz 3 4M    asdf 4000 gz 3 2M    asdf 2000 gz 2 5M    xyz PT gz 136K    xyz 6000 gz 116K    xyz 6000p gz 88K test 4000 gz 76K test 4000p gz 44K test 2000 gz 8 0K    desc common tcl 8 0K    wer 2000p gz 8 0K    wer 2000 gz 4 0K    ttree 3   Explanation   du displays  disk usage  h is for  human readable   both  in sort and in du  max-depth 0 means du will not show sizes of subfolders  remove that if you want to show all sizes of every file in every sub-  subsub-       folder  r is for  reverse   biggest file first    ncdu  When I came to this question  I wanted to clean up my file system  The command line tool ncdu is way better suited to this task   Installation on Ubuntu     sudo apt-get install ncdu   Usage   Just type ncdu  path  in the command line  After a few seconds for analyzing the path  you will see something like this     ncdu 1 11   Use the arrow keys to navigate  press   for help ---   ---------------------------------------------------------    96 1 GiB               home    17 7 GiB               usr     4 5 GiB               var     1 1 GiB               lib   732 1 MiB               opt   275 6 MiB               boot   198 0 MiB               storage   153 5 MiB               run    16 6 MiB               etc    13 5 MiB               bin    11 3 MiB               sbin     8 8 MiB               tmp     2 2 MiB               dev    16 0 KiB               lost found     8 0 KiB               media     8 0 KiB               snap     4 0 KiB               lib64 e   4 0 KiB               srv     4 0 KiB               root e   4 0 KiB               mnt e   4 0 KiB               cdrom     0 0   B               proc     0 0   B               sys     0 0   B               initrd img old     0 0   B               initrd img     0 0   B               vmlinuz old     0 0   B               vmlinuz   Delete the currently highlighted element with d  exit with CTRL   c

User · Answer

I tend to use du in a simple way   du -sh      sort -n   This provides me with an idea of what directories are consuming the most space   I can then run more precise searches later

User · Answer

enhanced version  This is going to be much faster and precise than the initial version below and will output the sum of all the file size of current directory   echo  find   -type f -exec stat -c  s         tr   n        sed  s     g     bc   the stat -c  s command on a file will return its size in bytes  The tr command here is used to overcome xargs command limitations  apparently piping to xargs is splitting results on more lines  breaking the logic of my command   Hence tr is taking care of replacing line feed with    plus  sign  sed has the only goal to remove the last   sign from the resulting string to avoid complains from the final bc  basic calculator  command that  as usual  does the math   Performances  I tested it on several directories and over  150 000 files top  the current number of files of my fedora 15 box  having what I believe it is an amazing result     time echo  find   -type f -exec stat -c  s         tr   n        sed  s     g     bc 12671767700  real    2m19 164s user    0m2 039s sys 0m14 850s   Just in case you want to make a comparison with the du -sb   command  it will output an estimated disk usage in bytes  -b option     du -sb   12684646920     As I was expecting it is a little larger than my command calculation because the du utility returns allocated space of each file and not the actual consumed space    initial version  You cannot use du command if you need to know the exact sum size of your folder because  as per man page citation  du estimates file space usage  Hence it will lead you to a wrong result  an approximation  maybe close to the sum size but most likely greater than the actual size you are looking for    I think there might be different ways to answer your question but this is mine   ls -l   find   -type f   xargs    cut -d    -f5   xargs   sed  s      g   bc   It finds all files under   directory  change   with whatever directory you like   also hidden files are included and  using xargs  outputs their names in a single line  then produces a detailed list using ls -l  This  sometimes  huge output is piped towards cut command and only the fifth field  -f5   which is the file size in bytes is taken and again piped against xargs which produces again a single line of sizes separated by blanks  Now take place a sed magic which replaces each blank space with a plus     sign and finally bc  basic calculator  does the math   It might need additional tuning and you may have ls command complaining about arguments list too long

User · Answer

Simple and fast    find   -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d   parallel du -s   sort -n    requires GNU Parallel

User · Answer

I think I might have figured out what you want to do   This will give a sorted list of all the files and all the directories  sorted by file size and size of the content in the directories    find   -depth 1 -type f -exec ls -s        find   -depth 1 -type d -exec du -s          sort -n

User · Answer

Simply navigate to directory and run following command    du -a --max-depth 1   sort -n   OR add -h for human readable sizes and -r to print bigger directories files first   du -a -h --max-depth 1   sort -hr

User · Answer

you can use the below to list files by size du -h   sort -hr   more or du -h --max-depth 0     sort -hr   more

User · Answer

du -s --     sort -n    this willnot show hidden   dotfiles  files   Use du -sm for Mb units etc  I always use  du -smc --     sort -n   because the total line  -c  will end up at the bottom for obvious reasons     PS    See comments for handling dotfiles I frequently use e g   du -smc  home     sort -n  tail  to get a feel of where exactly the large bits are sitting

User · Answer

Another simple solution     for entry in   ls   do du -s   entry   done   sort -n   the result will look like  2900    tmp 6781    boot 8428    bin 24932   lib64 34436   sbin 90084   var 106676  etc 125216  lib 3313136 usr 4828700 opt   changing  du -s  to  du -sh  will show human readable size  but we won t be able to sort in this method

User · Answer

ls -S sorts by size  Then  to show the size too  ls -lS gives a long  -l   sorted by size  -S  display  I usually add -h too  to make things easier to read  so  ls -lhS

[linux] How to list the size of each file and directory and sort by descending size in Bash?

Examples related to linux

Examples related to file

Examples related to bash