Use `find` to Search for Large Files on Linux.

When a disk starts running low on space, finding the largest files is a good first step. The Linux find command can search files by size, and -maxdepth lets you limit how far the search goes.

This guide shows how to find files larger than 20 MiB, restrict the search depth, and sort results by size.

Find files larger than 20 MiB

Search the current directory and all its subdirectories for regular files larger than 20 MiB:

$ find . -type f -size +20M

• . starts the search in the current directory.
• -type f matches regular files.
• -size +20M matches files whose apparent size is greater than 20 MiB. GNU find uses powers of 1024 for M.

find searches recursively by default. To search the whole filesystem, use / as the starting point:

$ sudo find / -type f -size +20M

A system-wide search may print permission errors. To hide those messages, redirect standard error:

$ sudo find / -type f -size +20M 2>/dev/null

Use sudo only when you need to inspect protected directories. Hiding errors can also hide other useful warnings, so omit the redirection while troubleshooting.

Limit the search depth

The starting directory is depth 0. With -maxdepth 1, find checks the starting directory itself but does not descend into its subdirectories:

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -size +20M

To include the current directory and its immediate subdirectories, use depth 2:

$ find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -size +20M

The hyphen is required: -maxdepth is the option name.

Sort results by size

To sort matching files by estimated disk space used, largest first, use GNU find, du, and sort:

$ find . -type f -size +20M -print0 | du --files0-from=- -h | sort -hr

-print0 safely separates file names, including names containing spaces or newlines. du --files0-from=- reads those names from standard input, -h prints human-readable sizes, and sort -hr sorts those sizes in descending order.

This pipeline requires GNU Findutils and GNU Coreutils. du reports estimated disk space used, which can differ from a file’s apparent size because of sparse files, filesystem block allocation, or hard links.

For a simpler view of apparent file sizes (the lengths reported by file metadata), use GNU find to print each size in bytes and sort numerically:

$ find . -type f -size +20M -printf '%s\t%p\n' | sort -nr

This sorts the numeric byte counts from largest to smallest. The output is less readable, but the numbers are actual bytes and are easy to compare.

Understand the size threshold

In GNU find, -size +20M means larger than 20 MiB, where 1 MiB is 1,048,576 bytes. The size test rounds up to the selected unit before applying the comparison. For an exact byte-based threshold, use the c suffix:

$ find . -type f -size +20971520c

This matches files whose apparent size is greater than 20 MiB in bytes.

Use find . -type f -size +20M to locate large files, and add -maxdepth when you want to limit how far the search descends. Sort the matches with du to see estimated disk usage or by byte count to compare apparent file sizes. The commands shown here use GNU tools commonly available on Linux.

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