How to find the largest file in a directory? [closed]

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Unix command to list all directories larger than 10mb

How to find the largest file in a directory?

Nathan Fellman · Answer 1 · 2011-01-04 07:29:08Z

up vote 10 down vote

The best way is to use ls, sorted by size:

ls -S

To get the biggest one, use head:

ls -S | head -1

answered Jan 4 '11 at 7:29

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John T · Answer 2 · 2011-01-04 08:01:05Z

up vote 2 down vote

Assuming you're in the directory already:

du -a | sort -nr | head -1

answered Jan 4 '11 at 8:01

John T
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	Sizes for subdirectories are also calculated. Maybe you should mention that -- I'm not sure which approach the OP prefers. – Daniel Beck Jan 4 '11 at 9:11
	Had it in there originally, figured it was logical to leave it in case one of the directories is large as well. – John T Jan 4 '11 at 9:14

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Joseph Symon · Answer 3 · 2011-01-04 09:07:25Z

You can use the find command to do this work.

Let DIR is the directory in which you want to find the largest file, run the following command:

find DIR/ -type f -size +5000k

This will list the files whose size greater than 5MB. You can adjust this value (ie. option size) according to your need.

If you want to check the files under this DIR only, use the below one. You can adjust the maxdepth value to check in subfolder.

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type f -size +5000k

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 4 '11 at 7:55