How can I find files that are bigger/smaller than x bytes?

Question

In terminal, how can I find files that are bigger or smaller than x bytes? I suppose I can do something like "find . -exec ls -l {} \;" then pipe the result to awk to filter by file size. But shouldn't there be an easier way than this? Thank you.

Answer 1

Am I missing the obvious here?

find . -type f -size +4096c

the -size switch explained:

-size n[cwbkMG]
          File uses n units of space.  The following suffixes can be used:

          `b'    for 512-byte blocks (this is the default if no suffix  is
             used)

          `c'    for bytes

          `w'    for two-byte words

          `k'    for Kilobytes (units of 1024 bytes)

          `M'    for Megabytes (units of 1048576 bytes)

          `G'    for Gigabytes (units of 1073741824 bytes)

          The  size  does  not  count  indirect  blocks, but it does count
          blocks in sparse files that are not actually allocated.  Bear in
          mind  that the `%k' and `%b' format specifiers of -printf handle
          sparse  files  differently.   The  `b'  suffix  always   denotes
          512-byte  blocks and never 1 Kilobyte blocks, which is different
          to the behaviour of -ls.

Answer 2

Greater than 2000 bytes:

du -a . | awk '$1*512 > 2000 {print $2}'

Less than 2000 bytes:

du -a . | awk '$1*512 < 2000 {print $2} '

Answer 3

find . | xargs du -b | perl -ne 'chomp;@p=split(/\s/);print"$p[1] ($p[0])\n"if$p[0]<=4096'

Prints all files that are lesser than or equal to 4096 bytes in size. Simply change the operator and number at the end of this one-liner to change the criteria.

The -b option for du gives you the number of bytes and is equivalent to the apparent size with a block size of 1. Apparent size is usually smaller and may not reflect actual disk-usage.

Answer 4

Awk really is quite easy for this sort of thing, here are some things you can do with it in relation to file size checking like you asked:

List files greater than 200 bytes

ls -l | awk '{if ($5 > 200) print $8}'

List files less than 200 bytes and write list to file

ls -l | awk '{if ($5 < 200) print $8}' | tee -a filelog

List files of 0 bytes, record list to file and delete the empty files

ls -l | awk '{if ($5 == 0) print $8}' | tee -a deletelog | xargs rm