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List top ten files/directories sorted by size

Terminal - List top ten files/directories sorted by size
du -s * | sort -nr | head | cut -f2 | parallel -k du -sh
2010-01-28 12:59:14
User: unixmonkey8046
Functions: cut du head sort
-2
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If a directory name contains space xargs will do the wrong thing. Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ deals better with that.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
du -sb *|sort -nr|head|awk '{print $2}'|xargs du -sh
2009-05-12 19:58:45
User: srand
Functions: awk du sort xargs
5
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Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

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What others think

That is, xargs does the "wrong thing" by default, but you can tell it to use any delimiter to separate arguments with the --delimeter option, such as a newline. xargs can also launch jobs in parallel with the -P option. It's good to know about the parallel command though, it's a perl script; I can't find it in Debian/Ubuntu though.

Comment by bwoodacre 172 weeks and 2 days ago

xargs has several race conditions if you use -P:

xargs will not guarantee you output with the biggest directory first. It will instead first output the job that finishes first. This is likely to be a problem here.

xargs may mix output, so output lines of jobs printing simultaneously can be mixed. This is not likely to be a problem here.

The solution using parallel prevents these two problems.

Comment by unixmonkey8046 172 weeks and 1 day ago

@bwoodacre: I have tried to think a way to fixup the xargs solution for the following dir. Can you fix it up?

mkdir '12" records'
Comment by unixmonkey8046 172 weeks and 1 day ago

Your point of view

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