Mac: How do I recursively find the largest files in a subdirectory (ignoring all directories)

Question

I have a directory called root. It has deeply nested subdirectories. In these subdirectories, there are a bunch of files. I want to find the biggest files in root.

I don't want to find directories at all. I don't care about the size of the largest directory, I just want to find the largest files.

root
|
- subdir1
  |
  - small file 1
  - large file 1
  - small file 2
  ... lots more files      
- subdir2
  |
  - small file 3
  - large file 2

I want to print out large file 1 and large file 2. I don't want it to print out anything about root, subdir1, or subdir2, even if they're bigger than large file 1 or 2. That's just noise to me.

How do I do that on a mac on the command line?

Answer 1

Let ls do the sorting->

find . -type f -exec ls -S {} + | head -n10

Answer 2

This is what I came up with:

find . -type f -exec ls -l {} + | sort -rk 5,5 | head -10

Find all files (this ignores directories), then ls -l them so I can see their sizes. Pass that into sort. -k 5,5 says to sort by the 5th column (the column that has size), and -r sorts descending. head -10 gives me the largest 10 (not the full list).