There are times when you need to figure out what is filling up disk space on a server or other device (block storage, CDN, external storage, etc) and quickly!
Things like:
- runaway logging
- backups & backup of backups
- large archives
- dev or beta areas for testing and development work
- clients or customers who suddenly upload a lot of files
The command you want to run in order to output where large files exist is:
find / -type f -size +1048576k -exec ls -lh {} ; 2> /dev/null | awk ‘{ print $NF “: ” $5 }’ | sort -nrk 2,2
The above would look for files greater than 1 gigabyte in size and then output the path to those files so you could further examine them. You can modify this for any file size [change -size +1048576k] to further refine your search criteria. You can output and sort this data to the screen or to a file just as easy.
