How to find large size files in Linux

If you want to display the largest files from the current directory

du -a | sort -n -r | head -n 5

To display output from a specific directory , here I m looking for the files from /var directory

du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10

To see the same output in more readable format like in GB from the current directory

du -hs * | sort -rh | head -5

some of the options thats using with the above command explained below :

1. du command: Estimate file space usage.
2. -h : Print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 10MB).
3. -S : Do not include size of subdirectories.
4. -s : Display only a total for each argument.
5. sort command : sort lines of text files.
6. -r : Reverse the result of comparisons.
7. head : Output the first part of files.

Find command to find all the large size files

The below command will display top 50 largest files (>100M) on your filesystem, and also sort by the largest comes first

 find / -xdev -type f -size +100M -exec du -sh {} ';' | sort -rh | head -n50

-xdev just prevents from crossing the filesystems, so the command will only search in the current physical drive