Finding the largest directories in one or more filesystems

Backups often choke on huge directories. This page describes a relatively fast way of tracking down huge directories.

Downloads:

largest-dirs
Also requires df-local - but only if you don't want to specify directories to search and my highest program for high speed even in huge filesystems.
Also requires GNU find and GNU xargs, to get the quoting right. Without these, the script should just error out

Usage is like:

What we're doing	The command we do it with	Requires df-local?
Finding the largest 25 directories on the entire system (not including pseudo filesystems and remote filesystems like NFS volumes)	largest-dirs	Yes
Finding the largest 25 directories under the given list of directories (not traversing filesystem boundaries)	largest-dirs / $HOME ~other /var/tmp /export/home	No

Hits: 5055
Timestamp: 2026-08-03 12:21:44 PDT

Back to Dan's tech tidbits

You can e-mail the author with questions or comments: