Filesystem full: how to find the biggest directories or biggest file?

Question

Under Linux, I'm looking for a command to list the biggest file and/or the biggest directories under a directory.

Answer 1

From any directory:

du -a | sort -n -r

Answer 2

Use du. Try this to order the result:

du | sort -n

Answer 3

du --max-depth=1 /path | sort -r -k1,1n shows you one level of directories and their sizes. If one of them really sticks out (the last one on the list is the largest due to sort -r), then you rerun the command on that directory, and then keep going until you find the offending directory/file.

If all you want is the ten biggest files just do find /home -type f -exec du -s {} \; | sort -r -k1,1n | head

Answer 4

du -sk * | sort -nr | head -1

This will show the biggest directory/file in a directory in KB. Changing the head value will result in the top x files/directories.