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 the unnecessary junks and free up them from your hard disk.

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

1. Learn 10 Useful ‘du’ (Disk Usage) Commands in Linux
2. Master the ‘Find’ Command with this 35 Practical Examples

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

Find Largest Directories in Linux

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:

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

Find Biggest Directories Only

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 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.

# du -hs * | sort -rh | head -5

Find Top Directories Sizes in Linux

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 few sub-directories or delete the entire folder to free up some space.

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

# du -Sh | sort -rh | head -5

Find Largest Folder and Sub directories

Find out the meaning of each options 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 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

Find Top File Sizes in Linux

To find the largest files in a particular location, just include the path besides 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

Find Top File Size in Specific Location

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

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