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

du -aS /PATH/TO/folder | sort -rn | head -2 | tail -1

or

du -aS /PATH/TO/folder | sort -rn | awk 'NR==2'