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I want to find files which are greater than 1 GB and older than 6 months in entire server. How to write a command for this?

2 Answers 2

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Use find:

find /path -mtime +180 -size +1G

-mtime means search for modification times that are greater than 180 days (+180). And the -size parameter searches for files greater than 1GB.

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    Note that in the find implementations where that G suffix is supported, it means GiB (1073741824 bytes), not GB (1000000000). Portably, you'd use find /path -mtime +180 -size +1073741824c May 13, 2015 at 12:11
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    if you want to avoid seeing errors between the list of files like these: find: a.txt :Permission denied I suggest adding this 2>/dev/null inspired from this comment: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/42841/…
    – gmansour
    Feb 10, 2018 at 3:24
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    You can also pipe the results into xargs ls -lhS to sort them by size: find /path -mtime +180 -size +1G | xargs ls -lhS
    – user553965
    Jan 29, 2019 at 19:46
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    @user553965 Your command won't work. What is actually needed to sort by size is: find / -size +1G -mtime +180 -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 ls -lhS. Newbies note: The redirection of 2>/dev/null just gets rid of the permission denied errors which will inevitably appear when searching from root. To sort by last modified date use ls -lht instead and adding r to the ls commands, e.g. ls -lhSr, will reverse the results (smallest to largest / oldest to newest).
    – mattst
    Oct 25, 2019 at 15:21
  • How do you also make it print out the human-readable size of each thing found? Aug 26, 2021 at 3:01
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find / -size +1G -mtime +180 -type f -print

Here's the explanation of the command option by option: Starting from the root directory, it finds all files bigger than 1 Gb, modified more than 180 days ago, that are of type "file", and prints their path.

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