Tip: Find Large Files

Here’s a useful tip for both admins and users. Ever want to find what file or directory is taking up all of your space? On Linux, use the built in find utility like this:

find / -size +1000k -print -xdev

This does a search from /, finding all files greater than 100,000 kB and lists them. The -xdev merely tells find not to descend into directories on other filesystems. As always, RTFM.

For Windows, use the built in Search utility. There is an option for searching by size entitiled What size is it? (in XP). For the same search, fill in at least and 1000.

This tip is similar to my previos tip on how to Monitor Disk Usage.

4 thoughts on “Tip: Find Large Files

  1. Thanks for the tip on finding the largest files, btw do you know any reason “df -h” would be innacurate? my output is
    Size 232M
    Used 220M
    Avail 0
    Use% 100%
    I have googled up a storm and have learned much of lsof and fuser commands but to no avail.
    I also rebooted. I am running Debian on PPC.
    thanks for any help.
    Jim Swanson
    urchin12001@yahoo.com

  2. thats because a non root user should not be able to fill up the filesystem i believe.
    I do not know where you can change this, maybe when mkfs-ing.

  3. quote:

    find / -size +1000k -print -xdev

    This does a search from /, finding all files greater than 100,000 kB and lists them.

    Isn’t it 1000KB and not 100,000KB?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s