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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 it's png is a mistake in itself but let's not get into that).

I would to get the list of png or jpg files that are in 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]?

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Is this really UNIX or do you mean Linux? Do you have access to the GNU versions of the classic tools? –  terdon♦ 7 hours ago

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

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 \0 instead of \n, so you can have paths with strange characters like spaces and newlines.

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Thanks it works like a charm! –  David Brossard 7 hours ago
up vote 6 down vote

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

$ find . -iname '*png' -printf '%s %p\n' | 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
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Not every find has -printf (e.g. NetBSD's find in the base system). find ...|stat ...|sort ... can help then... –  yeti 7 hours ago
    
@yeti I know, that's why I asked the OP to clarify if they have access to the GNU tools. –  terdon♦ 7 hours ago

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