Find The Largest Top 10 Files and Directories On a Linux / UNIX / BSD?

How Do I Find The Largest Top 10 Files and Directories On a Linux / UNIX / BSD?

Sometime it is necessary to find out what file(s) or directories are eating up all your disk space. Further, it may be necessary to find out it at the particular location such as /tmp or /var or /home.

Type the following command at the shell prompt to find out top 10 largest file/directories:
# du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10
 du -ah /var | sort -rh | head -n 10
Sample outputs:

1008372 /var
313236  /var/www
253964  /var/log
192544  /var/lib
152628  /var/spool
152508  /var/spool/squid
136524  /var/spool/squid/00
95736   /var/log/mrtg.log
74688   /var/log/squid
62544   /var/cache

If you want more human readable output try:
$ cd /path/to/some/where
$ du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -10
Where,

    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.

The above command will only work of GNU/sort is installed. Other Unix like operating system should use the following version (see comments below):

 
for i in G M K; do du -ah | grep [0-9]$i | sort -nr -k 1; done | head -n 11
 

Sample outputs:

179M .
84M ./uploads
57M ./images
51M ./images/faq
49M ./images/faq/2013
48M ./uploads/cms
37M ./videos/faq/2013/12
37M ./videos/faq/2013
37M ./videos/faq
37M ./videos
36M ./uploads/faq

Find the largest file in a directory and its subdirectories using find comamnd

Type the following GNU/find command:

## Warning: only works with GNU find ##
find /path/to/dir/ -printf '%s %p\n'| sort -nr | head -10
find . -printf '%s %p\n'| sort -nr | head -10
 

Sample outputs:

5700875 ./images/faq/2013/11/iftop-outputs.gif
5459671 ./videos/faq/2013/12/glances/glances.webm
5091119 ./videos/faq/2013/12/glances/glances.ogv
4706278 ./images/faq/2013/09/cyberciti.biz.linux.wallpapers_r0x1.tar.gz
3911341 ./videos/faq/2013/12/vim-exit/vim-exit.ogv
3640181 ./videos/faq/2013/12/python-subprocess/python-subprocess.webm
3571712 ./images/faq/2013/12/glances-demo-large.gif
3222684 ./videos/faq/2013/12/vim-exit/vim-exit.mp4
3198164 ./videos/faq/2013/12/python-subprocess/python-subprocess.ogv
3056537 ./images/faq/2013/08/debian-as-parent-distribution.png.bak

You can skip directories and only display files, type:

 
find /path/to/search/ -type f -printf '%s %p\n'| sort -nr | head -10
 

OR

 
find /path/to/search/ -type f -iname "*.mp4" -printf '%s %p\n'| sort -nr | head -10