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Find the Largest Top 10 Files and Directories On a Linux
Sometimes, it becomes important to find which files or directories are ingesting up, all of your disk area on a Linux. Similarly, we should be able to discover a particular directory location on file system such as /tmp/ or /var/ or /domestic/. This article will help you to use Unix and Linux commands for finding the most important or biggest files or directories on the file systems.
Although, there is no shortcut command which is available to discover the largest documents/directories on a Linux/UNIX/BSD file system but there is a possibility which we will be showcasing you about.
By aggregating the following three commands (the use of pipes) can help you easily discover a list of largest documents on a Linux machine.
- du command : It estimates file space usage
- sort command : Sort lines of text files or given input data
- head command : Output the first part of files i.e. to display first 10 largest file
- find command : It Searches file on Linux machine
Use the following command to find the largest Top 10 files and directories on a Linux system –
$ sudo du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10
The sample output should be like this –
1128132 /var 779176 /var/cache 629292 /var/cache/apt 541020 /var/cache/apt/archives 327212 /var/lib 172180 /var/lib/apt 172024 /var/lib/apt/lists 130084 /var/cache/apt-xapian-index 130080 /var/cache/apt-xapian-index/index.1 87556 /var/lib/dpkg
To see human readable output, use the following command –
$ du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -10
The sample output should be like this –
4.4G Desktop 3.8G Downloads 149M en-GB 146M Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-GB.tar.gz 95M scala-2.11.4.deb 20M gawk-4.1.1 4.5M linux-dash 3.9M yii-1.1.13.e9e4a0.tar.gz.1 3.9M yii-1.1.13.e9e4a0.tar.gz
The above command can be better understood with the following explanations –
- du command -h option : Display sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K, 234M, 2G).
- du command -s option : It shows 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 : It compares human readable numbers. This is GNU sort specific option only.
- head command -10 OR -n 10 option : It shows the first 10 lines.
The above command will work for GNU/sort which is installed on a Linux, Other Unix like operating systems uses the following command –
$find /path/to/dir/ -printf '%s %p
'| sort -nr | head -10 $find . -printf '%s %p
'| sort -nr | head -10
The sample output should be like this –
185016320 ./Desktop/gdb-7.9.tar 153300495 ./Downloads/apache-storm-1.0.0.tar.gz 152847886 ./Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-GB.tar.gz 98756608 ./scala-2.11.4.deb 96477184 ./.cache/chromium/Default/Cache/data_3 88088576 ./.cache/google-chrome/Default/Cache/data_3 66586000 ./Downloads/Apache24.zip 61919701 ./Downloads/apache-storm-1.0.0/external/flux/flux-examples-1.0.0.jar 55678503 ./Downloads/apache-storm-1.0.0/examples/storm-starter/storm-starter-topologies-1.0.0.jar
To skip directories and only display files, use the following command
$ find /path/to/search/ -type f -printf '%s %p
'| sort -nr | head -10
or
$ find /path/to/search/ -type f -iname "*.mp4" -printf '%s %p
'| sort -nr | head -10
Hunt Down Disk Space Hogs with Ducks
Use the following bash shell commands as shown below
$ alias ducks='du -cks * | sort -rn | head'
Use the following command to get top 10 files/dirs eating your disk space-
$ ducks
The sample output should be like this –
5994400 total 4559508 Desktop 673712 Downloads 151596 en-GB 149268 Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-GB.tar.gz 96444 scala-2.11.4.deb 20024 gawk-4.1.1 4544 linux-dash 3952 yii-1.1.13.e9e4a0.tar.gz.1
Congratulations! Now, you know “How to find The Largest Top 10 Files and Directories On a Linux”. We’ll learn more about these types of commands in our next Linux post. Keep reading!
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