Search large files linux

What’s a command line way to find large files/directories to remove and free up space?

What’s odd is I have two servers that are running the same thing. One is at 50% disk usage and the other is 99%. I can’t find what’s causing this.

13 Answers 13

If you just need to find large files, you can use find with the -size option. The next command will list all files larger than 10MiB (not to be confused with 10MB):

If you want to find files between a certain size, you can combine it with a «size lower than» search. The next command find files between 10MiB and 12MiB:

find / -size +10M -size -12M -ls 

apt-cache search ‘disk usage’ lists some programs available for disk usage analysis. One application that looks very promising is gt5 .

From the package description:

Years have passed and disks have become larger and larger, but even on this incredibly huge harddisk era, the space seems to disappear over time. This small and effective programs provides more convenient listing than the default du(1). It displays what has happened since last run and displays dir size and the total percentage. It is possible to navigate and ascend to directories by using cursor-keys with text based browser (links, elinks, lynx etc.)

On the «related packages» section of gt5, I found ncdu . From its package description:

Ncdu is a ncurses-based du viewer. It provides a fast and easy-to-use interface through famous du utility. It allows to browse through the directories and show percentages of disk usage with ncurses library.

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How to Find Out Top Directories and Files (Disk Space) in Linux

As a Linux administrator, you must periodically check which files and folders are consuming more disk space. It is very necessary to find unnecessary junk and free up from your hard disk.

This brief tutorial describes how to find the largest files and folders in the Linux file system using du (disk usage) and find command. If you want to learn more about these two commands, then head over to the following articles.

How to Find Biggest Files and Directories in Linux

Run the following command to find out top biggest directories under /home partition.

# du -a /home | sort -n -r | head -n 5

The above command displays the biggest 5 directories of my /home partition.

Find Largest Directories in Linux

If you want to display the biggest directories in the current working directory, run:

Let us break down the command and see what says each parameter.

1. du command: Estimate file space usage.
2. a : Displays all files and folders.
3. sort command : Sort lines of text files.
4. -n : Compare according to string numerical value.
5. -r : Reverse the result of comparisons.
6. head : Output the first part of files.
7. -n : Print the first ‘n’ lines. (In our case, We displayed the first 5 lines).

Some of you would like to display the above result in human-readable format. i.e you might want to display the largest files in KB, MB, or GB.

The above command will show the top directories, which are eating up more disk space. If you feel that some directories are not important, you can simply delete a few sub-directories or delete the entire folder to free up some space.

To display the largest folders/files including the sub-directories, run:

Find out the meaning of each option using in above command:

1. du command: Estimate file space usage.
2. -h : Print sizes in human-readable format (e.g., 10MB).
3. -S : Do not include the size of subdirectories.
4. -s : Display only a total for each argument.
5. sort command : sort lines of text files.
6. -r : Reverse the result of comparisons.
7. -h : Compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K, 1G).
8. head : Output the first part of files.

Find Out Top File Sizes Only

If you want to display the biggest file sizes only, then run the following command:

# find -type f -exec du -Sh <> + | sort -rh | head -n 5

To find the largest files in a particular location, just include the path beside the find command:

# find /home/tecmint/Downloads/ -type f -exec du -Sh <> + | sort -rh | head -n 5 OR # find /home/tecmint/Downloads/ -type f -printf "%s %p\n" | sort -rn | head -n 5

The above command will display the largest file from /home/tecmint/Downloads directory.

That’s all for now. Finding the biggest files and folders is no big deal. Even a novice administrator can easily find them. If you find this tutorial useful, please share it on your social networks and support TecMint.

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Linux Command , how to find files by size larger than x?

I’m trying to find files with size larger than «x» , ex: 32 bytes But what I found in ls —help was only ls -S , that just sort by size and not satisfied my demand I’m new to Linux , I’ve tried Google but I don’t know what keywords should I use to find answer , could somebody give me advice , thank you !

Your question is not about programing but about linux command that would be better in serverfault.com. If you want to ask something about shell script please read this first. stackoverflow.com/help/mcve

4 Answers 4

Try to use the power of find utility.

Find files greater than 32 bytes:

Of course you could also ask for files smaller than 32 bytes:

And files with exact 32 bytes:

For files with 32 bytes or more:

Or not smaller than 32 bytes (the same as above, but written another way):

And files between 32 and 64 bytes:

And you can also apply other common suffixes:

If you get find: illegal option — i error, specify the folder to search in after find . Add a dot to find files in the current folder: find . -size +32k -size -64M

You can change 32 for the size you want. In this case, I used your example.

Both answers you two provided me are excellent 😀 But I think I will give @rslemos the best answer tag since he’s «1 minute earier» , but still thanks to you !

Explanation: Use unix command find Using -size oprator

The find utility recursively descends the directory tree for each path listed, evaluating an expression (composed of the ‘primaries’ and ‘operands’) in terms of each file in the tree.

Solution: According to the documentation

-size n[ckMGTP] True if the file's size, rounded up, in 512-byte blocks is n. If n is fol- lowed by a c, than the primary is true if the file's size is n bytes (charac- ters). Similarly if n is followed by a scale indicator than the file's size is compared to n scaled as: k kilobytes (1024 bytes) M megabytes (1024 kilobytes) G gigabytes (1024 megabytes) T terabytes (1024 gigabytes) P petabytes (1024 terabytes) 

Usage: perform find operation with -size flag and threshold measurement arguments: more than(+)/less than(-), number(n) and measurement type (k/M/G/T/P).

Formula: find -size [+/-]

1.Greater Than — Find all files in my current directory (.) that greater than 500 kilobyte

2.Less Than — Find all files in my current directory (.) that less than 100 megabyte.

3.Range — Find specific file (test) in my current directory (.) that greater than 500 kilobyte less than 100 megabyte (500k-1000k)

find . -name "test" -size +500k -size -100M 

4.Complex Range with Regex Find all .mkv files in all filesystem (root /) that are greater than 1 gigabyte and created this month, and present info of them.

find / -name "*.mkv" -size +1G -type f -ctime -4w | xargs ls -la 

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How To Find Large Files on Linux

Locate the files that are consuming your Linux disk space.

We’ve all got to that point on a given system where we start to run out of storage space. Do we buy more storage, perhaps one of the best SSDs, or do we search and find the largest files quickly? In this how to we will look at a few simple approaches to help us maintain and manage our filesystems.

All the commands in this article will work on most Linux machines. We’ve used a Ubuntu 20.04 install but you could run this how-to on a Raspberry Pi. All of the how-to is performed via the Terminal. If you’re not already at the command line, you can open a terminal window on most Linux machines by pressing ctrl, alt and t.

Listing Files In Size Order Using the ls Command in Linux

The ls command is used to list the contents of a directory in Linux. By adding the -lS argument we can order the returned results according to the file size. We have copied a collection of files into a test directory to show this command but it can be run in any directory you choose.

To list the directory contents in descending file size order, use the ls command along with the -IS argument. You will see the larger files at the top of the list descending to the smallest files at the bottom.

While this command is useful for seeing, it lacks the actual size of the files so how can we identify the largest files in Linux and display their size?

Identifying Files Larger Than a Specified Size in Linux

In another article, we explained how to find files in Linux using the find command to search based on a filename or part of a filename. We can also use the find command in combination with the -size argument specifying a size threshold where any file larger than specified will be returned.\

1. Use find to search for any file larger than 100MB in the current directory. We are working inside our test directory and the “.” indicates to search the current directory. The -type f argument specifies returning files as results. Finally the +100M argument specifies that the command will only return files larger than 100MB in size. We only have one file in our test folder Baby_Yoda.obj that is larger than 100MB.

2. Use the same command, but this time specify a path to search. We can run the same command as in the previous section but replace the “.” with a specified path. This means we can search the test directory from the home directory.

cd find ./test -type f -size +100M

Searching the Whole Linux Filesystem For Large Files

It’s sometimes useful to search the whole Linux filesystem for large files. We may have some files hidden away in our home directory that need removing. To search the entire filesystem, we will need to use the command with sudo. We might also want to either limit the search to the current filesystem which can be achieved via the -xdev argument, for example when we suspect the files we seek are in our current main filesystem or we can choose not to add the -xdev argument which will then include results from other mounted filesystems, for example an attached USB drive.

1. Open a terminal.

2. Search the current filesystem for files larger than 100MB. As we are invoking root privileges using sudo we will need to input our password. Note that we are using / to set the command to search the entire filesystem from the root of the filesystem.

sudo find / -xdev -type f -size +100M

3. Search all filesystems for files larger than 100MB. For this example connect a USB drive with a collection of files on it including some that are over 100MB in size. You should be able to scroll through the returned results and see that the larger files on the pen drive have been included in the results.

sudo find / -type f -size +100M

Finding the 10 Largest Linux Files on Your Drive

What are the top ten files or directories on our machine? How large are they and where are they located? Using a little Linux command line magic we can target these files with only one line of commands.

1. Open a terminal.

2. Use the du command to search all files and then use two pipes to format the returned data.

du -aBM will search all files and directories, returning their sizes in megabytes.

/ is the root directory, the starting point for the search.

2>/dev/null will send any errors to /dev/null ensuring that no errors are printed to the screen.

| sort -nr is a pipe that sends the output of du command to be the input of sort which is then listed in reverse order.

| head -n 10 will list the top ten files/directories returned from the search.

sudo du -aBm / 2>/dev/null | sort -nr | head -n 10

3. Press Enter to run the command. It will take a little time to run as it needs to check every directory of the filesystem. Once complete it will return the top ten largest files / directories, their sizes and locations.

With this collection of commands, you have several ways to identify and locate large files in Linux. It’s extremely useful to be able to do this when you need to quickly select big files for deletion to free up your precious system resources. As always, take care when poking around your filesystem to ensure you aren’t deleting something critical!

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Jo Hinchliffe is a UK-based freelance writer for Tom’s Hardware US. His writing is focused on tutorials for the Linux command line.

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