Find largest files

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

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
 

This is also a good one ... here this returns the top 40:

find  -type f -printf '%s %p\n'| sort -nr | head -40

also see: http://linuxcountry.blogspot.com/2013/05/find-and-sort-all-files-by-size-save.html

Find and sort all files by size, save results to a text file on a Linux system

Find and order all files by size, save the result to a text file on a Linux system

du -k | sort -nr | awk '
     BEGIN {
        split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ",");
     }
     {
        u = 1;
        while ($1 >= 1024) {
           $1 = $1 / 1024;
           u += 1
        }
        $1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]);
        print $0;
     }
    ' > result_list_ordered.txt

Find the Size of Directory in Suse Linux

Try these


du -h ./


For the most part this works. If you have spaces in file/directory
names than you may get some errors, but I'm sure you can work around
those if needed:

ls -1drt *| xargs du -h --summarize



You could also try

du -hc --max-depth=1

This will give you all the directories in the current directory, and a total at the bottom. Play with the --max-depth to dig down further in the structure and get more fine-grained results.

You can run this with a pipe to grep "G" to do a quick search of folders that are large enough to be measured in gigabytes. It will pull any directories with a capital G in them, but there aren't many of those so it works for me.

du -hc --max-depth=1 | grep "G"