How To Find And Sort Files By Size In Linux Command Line

How to find and sort files by size in Linux command line. This tutorial explains on Linux, how to sort files by size descending or ascending.

How To Find And Sort Files By Size In Linux

You can use one of the following commands to find and sort files by size in Linux Ubuntu:

$ ls -lhS
$ ls -l
$ ls -lS
$ ls -lhS

NOTE: The command option ‘-h’ or ‘–human-readable’ is used to get the result in human readable format. It is used to append a size letter to each size, such as ‘M’ for mebibytes. Powers of 1024 are used, not 1000; ‘M’ stands for 1,048,576 bytes.

Sort Files By Size In Recursive Order In Linux

If you want to display the result in ascending order and show bigger files at the bottom and smaller files at the top, you can use the command option -r with the ls -lhSr command.

ls -lhSr

Get The 10 Biggest Files In A Directory

If you want to get the list of 10 biggest files in a directory, you can use the following command:

ls -lhS | head -11

Note that in the command above the number 11 is used instead of 10. It is so because the first line shows the total number of blocks used in the directory and the rest 10 are used to show the 10 biggest files in a directory.

Similarly if you want to include hidden files while sorting files by size, you can use “ls -lahS” command where the option -a shows the hidden files including the special . and .. directories.