Linux find command is used to search for files on the hard disk. A few days back, one of the partitions on my hard disk filled up to 99% with only a few hundred mega bytes free space remaining. So I wanted to find out which files were taking up maximum space on this partition and also figure out if I can delete any of them.
In Linux, finding large files is quite easy and can be accomplished from the console using the
find command as follows :
$ find <path> -size +10000k -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l
In the above find command,
<path> is the path of the directory or mount point which you want to search. The
+ (plus) sign preceding the 10000k figure tells find that it should search for all files which are over the 10 MB size.
-print0 tells find to print the full file name on standard output followed by a null character instead of the newline character that
-0 option of
The output of the
find command is piped to the
For example, to conduct the above search in the directory
/media/windows on my hard drive, I can run the following command(s) :
$ find /media/windows -size +10000k -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l
So the next time you want to know which files on your hard disk are using up the most space, you can rely on the Linux find command.