Bash - How to find the largest file in a directory

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 folders under it as well.

I know how to list and count all the regular files from the root folder using:

find . -type l | wc -l

But I'd like to know where to go from there in order to find the largest file in the whole directory. I've seen somethings regarding a du command, but we haven't learned that, so in the repertoire of things we've learned I assume we need to somehow connect it to the ls -t command.

And pardon me if my 'lingo' isn't correct, I'm still getting used to it!

Answer 1

There is no simple command available to find out the largest files/directories on a Linux/UNIX/BSD filesystem. However, combination of following three commands (using pipes) you can easily find out list of largest files:

# du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10

If you want more human readable output try:

$ cd /path/to/some/var
$ du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -10

Where,

• Var is the directory you wan to search
• 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.

Answer 2

Linux Solution: For example, you want to see all files/folder list of your home (/) directory according to file/folder size (Descending order).

sudo du -xm / | sort -rn | more