Finding files on a Unix server and sorting by size

I have a web server where I have run out of space and it’s causing issues with the WordPress sites I am running on them.

I know that I have a lot of large .png files (the fact that it’s PNG is a mistake in itself, but let’s not get into that).

I would like to get the list of PNG or JPEG files that are on the server and sort them by decreasing size. I know I can use ls -SlahR, but the sorting is on a per-folder basis.

I then came up with find . -name "*.png" | xargs -i -n1 ls -lah {} which is OK except that (a) it doesn’t sort the lines and (b) it shows the file permissions and ownerships which I couldn’t care less about.

So is there something better? Something that would produce [size] [path_to_file]?

Answers:

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Method 1

You can just do the whole thing with (GNU) find and sort, no need for du:

$ find . -iname '*png' -printf '%s %pn' | sort -rn
68109 ./7.png
21751 ./2.png
21751 ./1.png
5393 ./6.png
2542 ./5.png
1717 ./4.png
1003 ./3.png
878 ./10.png
793 ./9.png
587 ./8.png

Method 2

You could use a combination of find, du and sort like the following:

find <directory> -iname "*.png" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 du -b | sort -n -r

This searches for all regular files in <directory> ending with .png (case-insensitive). The result is then passed to xargs which calls du with each single file, getting its size in bytes (due to -b) and passed to sort, which sorts the result numerically (-n) by the file size in decreasing order (-r). The -print0 is used to separate the results by instead of n, so you can have paths with strange characters like spaces and newlines.

Method 3

And just in case you need to have the most compatible version, you can do it with regular find and sort (no reliance on gnu extensions, such as printf):

find . -ls | grep -i -e '.png$' -e '.jpe*g' | sort -k7,7nr

-k7,7 : Sort on columns 7 to 7 (ie, only 7)
(… this should be a parameter, allowing one to change the column number in case on their old system find -ls output sizes in bytes on a different column)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0