How to list all files in the size order

Question

I would like to list all files in the order of big to small in size and the files could be present anywhere in a certain folder.

Answer 1

Simply use something like:

ls -lS /path/to/folder/

Capital S.

This will sort files in size.

Also see:

man ls

-S     sort by file size

Update:

To exclude directories:

ls -lS | grep -v '^d'

Update 2:

I see now how it still shows symbolic links, which could be folders. Symbolic links always start with a letter l, as in link.

Change the command to filter for a -. This should only leave regular files:

ls -lS | grep '^-'

On my system this only shows regular files.

update 3:

To add recursion I would leave the sorting of the lines to the sort command and tell it to use the 5th column to sort on.

ls -lR | grep '^-' | sort -k 5 -rn

-rn means Reverse and numeric to get the biggest files at the top. Down side of this command is that it does not show the full path of the files.

If you do need the full path of the files, use something like this:

find -type f  | xargs du -h | sort -rn

The find command will recursively list all files in all sub directories, xargs will use the output of find as an argument to du -h meaning disk usage -humanreadable and then sort the output again.

Answer 2

You could use something like find and sort.

find . -type f -ls | sort -r -n -k7

(the -ls option is not standard but is found in many find implementations, not only the GNU one. In GNU find and others, it displays something similar to ls -li with a few exceptions, for instance, files with ACLs are not marked with a +)

If the file names may contain newline characters, with GNU find and GNU sort:

find . -type f -ls -printf '\0' | sort -zk7rn | tr -d '\0'

Answer 3

With zsh and GNU ls:

ls -ldU -- **/*(.OL)

(note that older versions of zsh had issues with file sizes over 2^32).

Some operating systems have a limit on the size of the argument list passed to a command. In those cases, you'd need:

autoload -U zargs
zargs ./**/*(.OL) -- ls -ldU

If you just want the list of files and not the detailed output, just do:

print -rl -- **/*(.OL)

If you want to include hidden files (whose name starts with a dot, except . and ..), add the D globbing qualifier:

print -rl -- **/*(.DOL)

Answer 4

Saying that "the files could be present anywhere in a certain folder" implies that you want to recursively descend all directories (folders) within the starting directory (folder). This is what find is meant to do:

find . -type f -exec ls -lSd {} +

This "finds" all files in the current working directory (.). For each file found, an ls process is run to sort the objects found in size order. The + terminator to the -exec causes multiple arguments to be passed as a list to ls. Unless your directory (folder) contains a very large number of files, you should have one list (and thus one process forked), leading to the result you desire.

Answer 5

I wrote something to this extent a while back. You could pass an argument to specify how many files to list, or just type big, in what case you get 10.

big () { 
    NUM_FILES=10;
    if [ $1 ]; then
        NUM_FILES=$1;
    fi;
    du | sort -nr | head -n $NUM_FILES
}