This page will show us how to create a list of files and folders ordered by size using standard Linux commands.
Command
To get a list with the size of each item in a folder, you’ll want to use the du command like this:
du -sm *
The -m argument will return the listing in megabytes (note that you can use -h for human readable, but it won’t sort correctly)
Now we will want to run this through the sort command, sorting in reverse order -r and numeric -n:
du -sm * | sort -nr
The only problem here is that we’ll get way too much output if there are a lot of files and folders, so we can either pipe it through the more command:
du -sm * | sort -nr | more
Or we can just return the top 15 largest items:
du -sm * | sort -nr | head -15
This will return a listing something like this:
2907 Files1 993 Files2 38 Somefile.txt
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