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

This will quickly display files last changed in a directory, with the newest on top. Show Sample Output

Original command: cat "log" | grep "text to grep" | awk '{print $1}' | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 100 This is a waste of multiple cats and greps, esp when awk is being used

by determining most popular use in history using percentage . Show Sample Output

Reads n lines from stdin and puts the contents in a variable. Yes, I know the read command and its options, but find this logical even for one line. Show Sample Output

Find top 5 big files

This command is more robust because it handles spaces, newlines and control characters in filenames. It uses printf, not ls, to determine file size.