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Sometimes you want to do some deep cleaning of your system by finding unnecessary large files and deleting them or removing files that are smaller than a predetermined size, such as logs. Linux provides various utilities that can help us find such files when used in conjunction.

This tutorial will show you how to use it in daily usage find, such as finding files in a folder based on their size.

To find the largest files in a given folder, we can use the duand sortcommands.

user@linux:~$ ls -lh
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 8.0M Jan 1 00:00 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 4.0M Jan 1 00:00 b
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 2.0M Jan 1 00:00 c
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1.0M Jan 1 00:00 d
user@linux:~$ du -h * | sort -h
1.0M    d
2.0M    c
4.0M    b
8.0M    a

This will print out the files in order of increasing size, so the largest files in the directory will be at the end of the program's output, and the smallest files will be at the beginning.

Note -hthe use of the - flag. This tells the command to give the sizes in human-readable form.

The following command finds and sorts the directories in your home directory in ascending order by size.

user@linux:~$ sudo find /var/ -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec du -sh {} \; | sort -h
4.0K    /var/local
4.0K    /var/mail
4.0K    /var/opt
56K     /var/spool
60K     /var/tmp
92K     /var/snap
7.3M    /var/backups
4.3G    /var/log
4.4G    /var/cache
17G     /var/lib
25G     /var/

If you know the minimum or maximum size of the files you are searching for, you can use findthe command to list such files.

Let's say you want to find all files larger than 200 MB (200M). We can do this with the following command, which also prints out the size of each file found. We use sudoto go into all root-owned directories.

Keep in mind that the output of a run may produce different files.

user@linux:/var$ sudo find . -type f -size +200M -exec ls -lh {} \;
-rw------- 2 root root 363M Jan 1 00:00 ./lib/snapd/snaps/qt513_24.snap
-rw------- 2 root root 363M Jan 1 00:00 ./lib/snapd/cache/cf177ca655544816bb73b6d8e89c83753b96548f105acd563c1bf1b7d0d046bd3e99a96db5bfe912f8a446a8e9d5b6c5

The Linux command dfallows us to view the overall disk usage of each partition of the file system, which can help shrink partitions that are over-utilizing space. We run the following command to find the disk usage.

Once again, this may look completely different depending on your disk configuration. snapThe entries with are called loopback disks, they are virtual disks that mount disk images, which are required by the Snap utility on Ubuntu.

user@linux:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           1.6G  2.1M  1.6G   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p6  200G   45G  146G  24% /
tmpfs           7.8G  397M  7.4G   5% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
/dev/nvme0n1p2   96M   36M   61M  37% /boot/efi
/dev/loop1       56M   56M     0 100% /snap/core18/2253
/dev/loop0      165M  165M     0 100% /snap/gnome-3-28-1804/161
/dev/loop2      512K  512K     0 100% /snap/gifex/3
/dev/loop3       66M   66M     0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1519
/dev/loop4      128K  128K     0 100% /snap/bare/5
/dev/loop6      363M  363M     0 100% /snap/qt513/24
/dev/loop7      100M  100M     0 100% /snap/core/11993
/dev/sda7       1.1T  384G  677G  37% /home
tmpfs           1.6G  1.9M  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/loop8       56M   56M     0 100% /snap/core18/2284