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 folder

Answer 1

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 }'