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

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'