How to find biggest (or smallest) files in a directory on linux with CLI commands¶

A few CLI tools are involved:

• Use find to traverse the target directory to get all the files
• Use du to get size of each file
• Use sort to rank the files by size
• Use head to pick the top ones

Command to get the top 5 biggest files¶

Suppose you want to get the top 5 biggest files in directory /var/log/:

find /var/log/ -type f -print0 | du -h --files0-from=- | sort -h --reverse | head -n 5

The output looks like:

17M     /var/log/supervisor/supervisord.log
288K    /var/log/lastlog
28K     /var/log/apt/eipp.log.xz
12K     /var/log/wtmp
8.0K    /var/log/dpkg.log.2.gz

Explanation in detail¶

Now let's explain the above command in detail:

• find /var/log/ -type f -print0
  • -type f: Only search files. Child directories are ignored.
  • -print0: Print file names on the standard output, followed by a null character, so that other programs can correctly process the output.
• du -h --files0-from=-
  • -h: Print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G).
  • --files0-from=-: Read names from standard input.
• sort -h --reverse
  • -h: Correspond to du -h.
  • --reverse: Sort from big to small.
• head -n 5 Pick the top 5.

Command to get 5 smallest files¶

If you want the top smallest files, replace sort -h --reverse with sort -h.

find /var/log/ -type f -print0 | du -h --files0-from=- | sort -h | head -n 5