File Size ??? 6 Ways to Find Largest Top Files and Directory in Linux
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Finding the size of large file and directories in Linux servers is one of the most important tasks that every system administrator came across in his daily tasks. So, every system administrator must know about multiple ways to find out the size of larger disks and files consuming the hard disks. Sometimes, it becomes more important, when your system's disk are getting filled so rapidly and you have to discover which files or directories are are ingesting up, all of your disk area on a Linux. In this case, we should be able to find a particular directory location where the data is being filled up. As there is no such shortcut command which is available to discover the largest documents or directories on a Linux or UNIX file system but there is some possibility by using some command line utilities that can help us reaching to the source location.
So, this article will help you to use multiples commands that can be used either on a Linux or UNIX like systems to find the most important or biggest files or directories on the file systems.
In order to practice and to find the disks space usage, the basic requirement is to have access to the command line terminal to the Linux system. Then login to your server using root or sudo privileged user to start tracking your system with largest files and directories.
Use below command to find the to 10 largest files in a particular directory of your system.
To get a list of top 10 biggest files recursively in the current directory use below command.
You can specify any directory extended by 'gt5' command to check the top size directories and files. To further expand the directories, drag your mouse cursor on that directory and hit enter.
Let's change your directory to another path and run 'gt5' command for the inside view of top files and directories.
To get more information to use 'gt5' regarding disk usage on Linux systems, use below command.
The basic syntax for 'du' is as shown below.
The biggest folder appears on top which facilitates you for troubleshooting. You can use its help command to know more about its usage to get more benefit from this.
Let's create a new file using your command line editor like 'vi' and put the following content in it as shown below.
6 Ways to Find Largest Top Files and Directory in Linux
Finding the size of large file and directories in Linux servers is one of the most important tasks that every system administrator came across in his daily tasks. So, every system administrator must know about multiple ways to find out the size of larger disks and files consuming the hard disks. Sometimes, it becomes more important, when your system's disk are getting filled so rapidly and you have to discover which files or directories are are ingesting up, all of your disk area on a Linux. In this case, we should be able to find a particular directory location where the data is being filled up. As there is no such shortcut command which is available to discover the largest documents or directories on a Linux or UNIX file system but there is some possibility by using some command line utilities that can help us reaching to the source location.
So, this article will help you to use multiples commands that can be used either on a Linux or UNIX like systems to find the most important or biggest files or directories on the file systems.
In order to practice and to find the disks space usage, the basic requirement is to have access to the command line terminal to the Linux system. Then login to your server using root or sudo privileged user to start tracking your system with largest files and directories.
1) Using find command
The 'find' command is very useful to search for files in a directory hierarchy and to search for finding large files and directories in your system. Let's run the command below to lists all files that have the size bigger than 50MB, you can specify the even larger number.# find / -xdev -type f -size +50MTo find more detailed results about these large files, you can extend your 'find' command below parameters.
# find / -xdev -type f -size +50M -exec ls -alh {} \; | sort -nk 5
Use below command to find the to 10 largest files in a particular directory of your system.
# find /usr -type f -printf "%s %p\n" | sort -rn | head -n 10
114973832 /usr/share/fonts/opentype/noto/NotoSansCJK.ttc 83333096 /usr/lib/thunderbird/libxul.so 78809336 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libOxideQtCore.so.0 71551944 /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so 58250232 /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/libmergedlo.so 41729688 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37.19.4 41587032 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libLLVM-3.8.so.1 41294304 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/webkit2gtk-4.0/WebKitPluginProcess2 37857816 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5WebKit.so.5.5.1 35945726 /usr/local/bin/consulUsing below command, you can get more information about the usage of 'find' command to search for the top files in your system
# find --help
2) Using ls command
The 'ls' is a Linux shell command that lists directory contents of files and directories. You can use this command in many ways to list the files and folders. To check the lists the files in the current directory ordered by size with bigger size on the top run below command.# ls -alhS
-rw------- 1 root root 59K Apr 18 20:57 agedu.dat -rw------- 1 root root 13K Apr 20 18:27 .gt5.html -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10K Jan 25 03:43 index.html -rw------- 1 root root 4.1K Apr 22 22:06 .bash_history drwx------ 6 root root 4.0K Apr 18 20:57 . drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4.0K Apr 17 10:40 .. drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Apr 20 17:03 .cache drwx------ 3 root root 4.0K Apr 12 15:38 .gnupg drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Apr 20 18:27 .gt5-diffs drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K Apr 20 18:29 .w3m -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.1K Oct 22 2015 .bashrc -rw------- 1 root root 1.1K Apr 12 15:43 .viminfo -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 148 Aug 17 2015 .profileSimilarly, you can use 'ls' command to add with
r for
recursively displaying the size of files in the current directory or you
can specify the path of that directory you wish to see the size of
files present there.# ls -lhtr
# ls -lhtr /var/log/
To get a list of top 10 biggest files recursively in the current directory use below command.
# ls -1Rhs | sed -e "s/^ *//" | grep "^[0-9]" | sort -hr | head -n10
456K initial-status.gz 356K syslog 248K dpkg.log 216K syslog.1 168K kern.log 160K kern.log.1 100K dpkg.log.2.gz 96K partman 92K syslog 84K syslog.6.gzTo get more help to use 'ls' command, you can use below command.
# ls --help
3) Using gt5 tool
The 'gt5' is another awesome command line tool, that can be used to check the size of files & directories on a Linux system. But, it must be installed on your system before you can start using it. To install 'gt5' you can below command on your Linux system.# apt install gt5After installation, you can use this to check the size of your system files and directories using below commands.
# gt5
# gt5 /var
You can specify any directory extended by 'gt5' command to check the top size directories and files. To further expand the directories, drag your mouse cursor on that directory and hit enter.
# gt5 /var/log
Let's change your directory to another path and run 'gt5' command for the inside view of top files and directories.
# cd /usr/src/linux-headers-4.10.0-20-generic/
#gt5
To get more information to use 'gt5' regarding disk usage on Linux systems, use below command.
4) Using du command
The 'du' command abbreviated as disk usage, reports the sizes of directory trees inclusive of all of their contents and the sizes of individual files. This makes it useful for tracking down space hogs, that is, directories and files that consume large or excessive amounts of space on a hard disk drive or other storage media.The basic syntax for 'du' is as shown below.
# du [options] [directories and/or files]To find out the top files and directories on a Linux/UNIX filesystem, there is not any appropriate command of du to get the required output but using it with other commands like 'sort', 'head' and 'find' commands as shown below. To get the output in the more human readable form you can use '-h' parameter with the 'du' command.
# du -ah /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10
1020K /var/cache/apt/archives/fonts-dejavu-core_2.37-1_all.deb 1016K /var/cache/apt/archives/udev_232-21ubuntu3_amd64.deb 1016K /var/cache/apt/archives/libxatracker2_12.0.6-0ubuntu0.16.04.1_amd64.deb 1016K /var/cache/apt/archives/colord-data_1.3.3-2_all.deb 1016K /var/cache/apt/archives/colord-data_1.3.2-1_all.deb 1004K /var/cache/apt/archives/libxatracker2_12.0.6-0ubuntu0.16.10.1_amd64.deb 1004K /var/cache/app-info/gv 1000K /var/cache/app-info/gv/en_US.gvz 996K /var/cache/apt/archives/udev_231-9ubuntu4_amd64.deb 996K /var/cache/apt/archives/netpbm_2%3a10.0-15.3build1_amd64.debNext you can use below command by moving into your required directory where you want to check the top files as shown.
# cd /var/log/
# du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -10
2.9M dpkg.log.1 2.0M dist-upgrade 1.6M kern.log.1 932K installer 232K syslog.2.gz 228K tomcat8 188K syslog.1 188K auth.log.1 144K kern.log 136K aptYou can use 'du' command with its more available options that you can get from its manual page, that can be viewable using below command.
5) ncdu commands to check disk usage
Ncdu is a disk usage analyzer with a Ncurses interface. It is very useful and easy to use when it comes to tracking down space consuming files and directories. You can simply install it using below command on your Ubuntu or RHEL system.# apt install ncdu
# yum install ncduAfter installation, you can start using this command to check disk usage of your system.
# ncduAfter running this command, it will start updating your disk and show the results on the terminal. Use below command to check the disk usage of root partition of your system.
# ncdu /
The biggest folder appears on top which facilitates you for troubleshooting. You can use its help command to know more about its usage to get more benefit from this.
6) Shell Script To Find Top Disk Consuming Directories
In this shell script, we will see that which top directories are consuming the large disk space, so that we may be able to free some space during an emergency. The commands that we used in this script are 'du' with different keys, 'sort' and 'head'.Let's create a new file using your command line editor like 'vi' and put the following content in it as shown below.
# vim topdir.sh
#/bin/bash
#check if user input argument
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
#if no argument print next messge and exit from script
echo "Usage: $0 "
exit 1
fi
# Save first arguments to variables
CheckedDir="$1"
#
HeadValue=$2
#set value for variable count value 1
count=1
#just print empty line
echo ""
#Print next message:
echo "Here is the ${HeadValue} biggest directories located in ${CheckedDir}:"
echo ""
#Getting list of directories and space they use.
du -a --max-depth=1 --one-file-system ${CheckedDir}/ |
#next we sort result
sort -rn |
sed "1d" |
# next we get only first X directories
head -"${HeadValue}" |
#next print result to user
while read size dirrr ; do
#counting size in Mb
size="$(( size / 1024 ))"
#show output for user
echo "N°${count} : ${dirrr} is ${size} Mb"
((count++))
done
echo ""
Save and close the configuration file, give the file executable
permissions and then run the script to find the top directories under
your defined location as shown.# chmod +x topdir.sh
# ./topdir.sh /var/log/
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