How to list the size of each file and directory and sort by descending size in Bash?

Question

Simply navigate to directory and run following command:

du -a --max-depth=1 | sort -n

OR add -h for human readable sizes and -r to print bigger directories/files first.

du -a -h --max-depth=1 | sort -hr

Apparently --max-depth option is not in Mac OS X's version of the du command. You can use the following instead.

du -h -d 1 | sort -n

du -s -- * | sort -n

(this willnot show hidden (.dotfiles) files)

Use du -sm for Mb units etc. I always use

du -smc -- * | sort -n

because the total line (-c) will end up at the bottom for obvious reasons :)

PS:

• See comments for handling dotfiles
• I frequently use e.g. 'du -smc /home// | sort -n |tail' to get a feel of where exactly the large bits are sitting

Command

du -h --max-depth=0 * | sort -hr

Output

3,5M    asdf.6000.gz
3,4M    asdf.4000.gz
3,2M    asdf.2000.gz
2,5M    xyz.PT.gz
136K    xyz.6000.gz
116K    xyz.6000p.gz
88K test.4000.gz
76K test.4000p.gz
44K test.2000.gz
8,0K    desc.common.tcl
8,0K    wer.2000p.gz
8,0K    wer.2000.gz
4,0K    ttree.3

Explanation

• du displays "disk usage"
• h is for "human readable" (both, in sort and in du)
• max-depth=0 means du will not show sizes of subfolders (remove that if you want to show all sizes of every file in every sub-, subsub-, ..., folder)
• r is for "reverse" (biggest file first)

ncdu

When I came to this question, I wanted to clean up my file system. The command line tool ncdu is way better suited to this task.

Installation on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install ncdu

Usage:

Just type ncdu [path] in the command line. After a few seconds for analyzing the path, you will see something like this:

$ ncdu 1.11 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- / ---------------------------------------------------------
.  96,1 GiB [##########] /home
.  17,7 GiB [#         ] /usr
.   4,5 GiB [          ] /var
    1,1 GiB [          ] /lib
  732,1 MiB [          ] /opt
. 275,6 MiB [          ] /boot
  198,0 MiB [          ] /storage
. 153,5 MiB [          ] /run
.  16,6 MiB [          ] /etc
   13,5 MiB [          ] /bin
   11,3 MiB [          ] /sbin
.   8,8 MiB [          ] /tmp
.   2,2 MiB [          ] /dev
!  16,0 KiB [          ] /lost+found
    8,0 KiB [          ] /media
    8,0 KiB [          ] /snap
    4,0 KiB [          ] /lib64
e   4,0 KiB [          ] /srv
!   4,0 KiB [          ] /root
e   4,0 KiB [          ] /mnt
e   4,0 KiB [          ] /cdrom
.   0,0   B [          ] /proc
.   0,0   B [          ] /sys
@   0,0   B [          ]  initrd.img.old
@   0,0   B [          ]  initrd.img
@   0,0   B [          ]  vmlinuz.old
@   0,0   B [          ]  vmlinuz

Delete the currently highlighted element with d, exit with CTRL + c

ls -S sorts by size. Then, to show the size too, ls -lS gives a long (-l), sorted by size (-S) display. I usually add -h too, to make things easier to read, so, ls -lhS.