A more efficient way, with reversed order to put the focus in the big ones. Show Sample Output

Same result as with 'du -ks .[^.]* * | sort -n' but with size outputs in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

This command summarizes the disk usage across the files and folders in a given directory, including hidden files and folders beginning with ".", but excluding the directories "." and ".." It produces a sorted list with the largest files and folders at the bottom of the list Show Sample Output

This will list all the files that are a gigabyte or larger in the current working directory. Change the G in the regex to be a M and you'll find all files that are a megabyte up to but not including a gigabyte. Show Sample Output

Lists directory size up to a maximum traversal depth on systems like IBM AIX, where the du command doesn't have Linux's --max-depth option. AIX's du uses -g to display directory size on gigabytes, -m to use megabytes, and -k to use kilobytes. tr### is a Perl function that replaces characters and returns the amount of changed characters, so in this case it will return how many slashes there were in the full path name. Show Sample Output

To sort the list by file/directory size, insert `sort -n |` before `awk`. Show Sample Output

http://superuser.com/questions/9847/linux-utility-for-finding-the-largest-files-directories

I don't like doing a massive sort on all the directory names just to get a small set of them. the above shows a sorted list of all directories over 1GB. use head as well if you want. du's "-x" flag limits this to one file system. That's mostly useful when you run it on "/" but don't want "/proc" and "/dev" and so forth. Remember though that it will also exclude "/home" or "/var" if those are separate partitions. the "-a" option is often useful too, for listing large files as well as large directories. Might be slower.

list the top 15 folders by decreasing size in MB Show Sample Output

You can simply run "largest", and list the top 10 files/directories in ./, or you can pass two parameters, the first being the directory, the 2nd being the limit of files to display. Best off putting this in your bashrc or bash_profile file Show Sample Output

without reverse...

Also shows files as they are found. Only works from a tty.

In OSX you would have to make sure that you "sudo -s" your way to happiness since it will give a few "Permission denied" errors before finally spitting out the results. In OSX the directory structure has to start with the "Users" Directory then it will recursively perform the operation. Your Lord and master, Mematron Show Sample Output

the -h option of du and sort (on appropriate distrib) makes output "Human" readable and still sorted by "reversed size" (sort -rh) Show Sample Output

This command give a human readable result without messing up the sorting.

I had the problem that our monitoring showed that the "/" filesystem is >90% full. This command helped me to find out fast which subdirs are the biggest. The system has many NFS-mounts therefore the -x.

Search for files and list the 20 largest. find . -type f gives us a list of file, recursively, starting from here (.) -print0 | xargs -0 du -h separate the names of files with NULL characters, so we're not confused by spaces then xargs run the du command to find their size (in human-readable form -- 64M not 64123456) | sort -hr use sort to arrange the list in size order. sort -h knows that 1M is bigger than 9K | head -20 finally only select the top twenty out of the list Show Sample Output

All folders, human-readable, no subfolder, with a total. Even shorter.

This command simply outputs 10 files in human readable, that takes most space on your disk in current directory.

In this case I'm just grabbing the next level of subdirectories (and same level regular files) with the --max-depth=1 flag. leaving out that flag will just give you finer resolution. Note that you have to use the -h switch with both 'du' and with 'sort.' Show Sample Output

as per eightmillion's comment. Simply economical :)