News How To Find Large Files on Linux

[Admin]

In this how-to, we will look at several approaches to finding large files. We will look at a simple way to list all directory contents in order and then look at ways of searching and identifying files that are larger than a we specify.

How To Find Large Files on Linux : Read more

 

[luizfnpinho]

I was wondering what would be the best way to list the most dense folder, in terms of disk occupation. I had already a situation where an application was (wrongly) creating thousands of small files, and it was hard to find out the disk space's offender.

 

[DotNetMaster777]

Useful commands

 

[domih]

I was wondering what would be the best way to list the most dense folder, in terms of disk occupation. I had already a situation where an application was (wrongly) creating thousands of small files, and it was hard to find out the disk space's offender.

Suggestion

• cd to a directory you have access to.
• run:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} sh -c 'echo $(find "{}" -printf "\n" | wc -l) "{}"' | sort -nr | head -n 10

This return the top 10 folders with the most files (not necessarily the biggest folders in size).

Example

domih@trx:~$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} sh -c 'echo $(find "{}" -printf "\n" | wc -l) "{}"' | sort -nr | head -n 10
257681 .
86846 ./.cache
26093 ./.mozilla
19392 ./.config
18697 ./.phoronix-test-suite
15151 ./.gradle
13930 ./clion-2021.3.4
13289 ./.local
10035 ./.cargo
5962 ./.wine

Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9157138/recursively-counting-files-in-a-linux-directory

Otherwise to manually peruse through a file system:

https://www.systranbox.com/how-to-install-baobab-linux/

Alternatively, use ncdu which is more useful than the GUI-based Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab):

sudo apt install ncdu
# Go to the directory you want to analyze or pass the directory path as parameter
ncdu ~
# Read the ncdu man page to look at all the options and commands.

Ref: comment in https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/check-disk-usage-linux

 

[ravenpi]

I was wondering what would be the best way to list the most dense folder, in terms of disk occupation. I had already a situation where an application was (wrongly) creating thousands of small files, and it was hard to find out the disk space's offender.

One thing that I tend to do in these circumstances -- which I don't have time to flesh out right now -- is to take a snapshot of whatever it is I'm looking at (in your case, directories), then take another look, say, 20 seconds later, and see which one has the biggest delta -- e.g., in your case, the most files created in that interval.