How to display “human-readable” file sizes in find results?

Question

I'm trying to find all large files on my Centos server. To do that I'm using:

find / -maxdepth 10 -size +100000 -ls

I tried changing -ls to -lsh but it is not allowed.

How can I display these results with human-readable sizes (using suffixes k, M, …)?

Answer 1

find doesn't have sophisticated options like ls. If you want ls -h, you need to call ls.

find / -maxdepth 10 -size +100000 -exec ls -lh {} +

I recommend the -xdev option to avoid recursing into other filesystems, which would be useless if you're concerned about disk space.

find / -xdev -maxdepth 10 -size +100000 -exec ls -lh {} +

If you use zsh as your shell, then instead of using find, you can use glob qualifiers. Limiting the file size is simple: L followed by a size; the size can have an optional unit before the number. If you don't care about the maximum depth, you can use **/ to recurse into subdirectories. If you care about maximum depth, it's more cumbersome as zsh glob patterns lack a way to express “at most n occurrences”. To avoid cross-device recursion, use the d glob qualifier; you need to find the device number, which you can display with the stat command under Linux (stat -c %d / to display just the number) or with zsh's own stat builtin (run zmodload zsh/stat to load it).

ls -lh /**/*(L+M99d$(stat -c %d /))

Answer 2

The command you are trying is readable to me. However, you can make use of the file utility with the find as below.

find / -maxdepth 10 -size +100000 -exec sh -c 'file -b {} | grep text &>/dev/null' \; -print

Another way to do this is using the below command.

du -BM / | sort -nr

The above command will give you the files in the sorted file size.

If you are using coreutils > 7.5, you can issue the below command to list the files by sizes.

du -ah / | grep -v "/$" | sort -h

In my machine, I did not had the sort -h option available.

As you had mentioned in the comment, your human readable format is the file should have the size in kb, mb or gb. I would go with the second command that I had posted as the answer. The output that I got when I used it in my system is,

du -BM /home/ramesh/chk1/ | sort -nr

50M     /home/ramesh/chk1/
21M     /home/ramesh/chk1/Hierarchical_Clustering_Working
3M      /home/ramesh/chk1/checking_files
1M      /home/ramesh/chk1/checking/checking2
1M      /home/ramesh/chk1/checking/checking1
1M      /home/ramesh/chk1/checking/asdf
1M      /home/ramesh/chk1/checking

Answer 3

I think what you are after is more like the following.

find / -maxdepth 10 -size +100000 -exec ls -lah {} + 

The -exec allows you to execute a command and the {} is substituted with the result of the the find. Lastly the + is to tell find it is the end of the command and it is required.

Answer 4

I prefer the cleaner output of du -bah over ls -hl (wish I could use du -hab for memorability but the order makes a difference):

find / -maxdepth 10 -size +100000 -exec du -bah {} + 2> /dev/null

du's -b, --bytes or --apparent-size --block-size=1 option is needed as du usually shows disk block sizes instead of exact file size.

Note that the du -b option might not exist in du on macOS systems.