Directories Exceeding a Certain Size?

Question

I misread this question and thought it was asking something I've needed for a long time. My question is slightly different: how to find directories whose contents exceed a certain size. Is there any *nix way to do this?

Answer 1

find doesn't look at the cumulative size of subdirectories. Instead, use du with the -s option to tell it to print only the total size of each directory given on the command line:

du -s *|awk '{ if ($1 > 3000) print }'

will give you output like:

3124    foo
10025   bar

or, to print just the names:

du -s *|awk '{ if ($1 > 3000) print $2 }'

Answer 2

Does find . -type d -size +3k -print do what you are asking? Change the "3k" to whatever size you want, of course.

Answer 3

A couple expansions on Peter Westlake's answer:

• The --max-depth option can be used to limit the depth of subdirectories du will search. In the example below the search is to 2 levels.

• You can use the -B option for du to set a block size for the du output. In the following example, the directory size is kilobytes (1000 bytes here). For now, you may be able to use the -k (kilobytes) and -m (megabytes) options, but man tells me they are deprecated, so I would recommend you avoid them. (Otherwise you'll be in the situation I may end up in - in the habit of using them and frustrated when they go away!)

  $ du --max-depth=2 -B 1000 | awk '{if($1>=5) print $0};'

One more point: If you want the output sorted by directory size, pipe it through sort -n, which will sort the output numerically (the -n) and default to using the first column (the directory size).