Linux find largest file in directory recursively using find/du

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Originally published at: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-find-largest-file-in-directory-recursively-using-find-du/

I have 500GB SSD installed on my Linux server. My web server is running out of the disk space. I need to find a biggest or largest file concerning file size on the disk. How do I find largest file in a directory recursively using the ?

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First I tried

find . -type f | xargs du -a | sort -nr | head

but this doesn’t cleanly take care of filenames with spaces in them (sadly I have friends that use them)
the following is more awkward, but works

find . -type f -exec du -a ‘{}’ ; | sort -nr | head

on a big disk this may take a while. Replace “.” with the root directory if you don’t want the current directory.

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Is the 500GB drive your only drive or part of a larger disk system?

sudo du -xak |sort -n

The command above is one I often relied on during my monitoring shifts.