How to Sort files and folders by size

July 27, 2007 · General · Email This Post

Share

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and if you have questions related to your ubuntu system post question to our forums. Thanks for visiting!

{lang: 'en-GB'}

If you want to Sort your files and folders by size use the following tip

You need to open terminal use the following command

ls -lS --block-size=1 | awk ‘ {print $5,$6,$7,$8}’ >size.txt; du -s --block-size=1 */ >>size.txt; sort -n size.txt

or

{ ls -lS --block-size=1 | awk ‘ {print $5,$6,$7,$8}’; du -s --block-size=1 */ ; } | sort -nr | less

Related posts

• Working with Songbird and wma files (3)
• Workaround for Feisty screensaver bug (6)
• Windows NTFS Partitions Read/write support made easy in Ubuntu Feisty (46)
• Winamp Presets for your XMMS Music Player (16)
• Widescreen Resolutions for Intel Display Cards In Ubuntu Feisty (5)
• What to Expect from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) (29)
• What package is that file in ? (1)

10 Comments to “How to Sort files and folders by size”

1. Eli Criffield says:

   August 2, 2007 at 3:05 pm

   This is i think the first thing someone showed me my first day on the job as a unix admin may years ago.

   $ du -s * |sort -n

   with gnu du you can add -m to get the output in megs. ( du -sh * is nice too but won’t sort)

   $ du -sm * |sort -n

   Many Many hours of a Unix admins life is spent doing du -s * |sort -n then cd to the last directory and repeat ….

   If your looking for what filled up your filesystem that wasn’t full an hour ago you can also whip together a big find command to find all files over say 100 megs that where modified in the last hour.

   Eli Criffield

   [Reply]
2. ahvargas says:

   August 5, 2007 at 4:47 am

   You can do this to:
   for i in `du -s * |sort -n |cut -f2`; do du -h $i; done

   [Reply]
3. ahvargas says:

   August 13, 2007 at 12:43 am

   Also you can try this:
   ls -Slh|cut -c32-36,52-

   [Reply]
4. Just Another Perl Hacker says:

   February 25, 2009 at 7:26 am

   Along the lines of Eli Crffield’s post (but showing everything underneath, instead of just the pwd) how about:

   du -ab | sort -n

   [Reply]
5. Just Another Perl Hacker says:

   February 25, 2009 at 7:34 am

   BTW, I forgot… for those of you who prefer gui interaction, there’s always something like “kfind” and “gnome-find” too. Ah… so many ways to slice the onion!

   [Reply]
6. Angelos says:

   July 17, 2010 at 2:27 am

   du -h | sort -n #works fine for me

   [Reply]
7. Travis Williams says:

   June 22, 2011 at 9:11 pm

   ls -lSh works for me.

   [Reply]
8. TankerKevo says:

   November 7, 2011 at 10:11 pm

   ls -lrSh

   Same deal as Travis but larger files sorted to the bottom of the list.

   [Reply]
9. faif says:

   January 2, 2012 at 3:13 pm

   To get a sorted human-readable output of the file size and name you can use:

   ls -lSh *.ogg | awk ‘{print $6 “\t” $9}’

   [Reply]

   faif Reply:
   January 3rd, 2012 at 9:20 am

   Since the previous solution works only on files (ls reports the default block size for directories), here’s a second (slower) solution that works on mixed (directories and files) lists:

   du -s ~/* | sort -rn | awk ‘{print $2}’ | xargs du -sh

   [Reply]