How to find the most largest 10 files on Ubuntu?

To find the largest 10 files in a directory recursively on Ubuntu, use a combination of the

find, du, sort, and head commands. 

Command to find the 10 largest files (human-readable format)

Run the following command in your terminal. Replace . with the specific directory path if you want to search a different location: 

bash

find . -type f -exec du -Sh {} + | sort -rh | head -n 10

Explanation of the Command

Here is a breakdown of the commands and options used:

• find .: Starts the search from the current directory (.) and traverses all subdirectories recursively.
• -type f: Restricts the search to regular files only, ignoring directories, links, etc..
• -exec du -Sh {} +: Executes the du command on the found files.
  • du: Estimates file space usage.
  • -S: Reports the size of individual files, not including the size of subdirectories (important for listing individual files correctly).
  • -h: Displays sizes in a human-readable format (e.g., 10MB, 2G).
  • {} and +: These are used by find to pass multiple filenames to a single du command efficiently.
• |: Pipes the output of the find command to the sort command.
• sort -rh: Sorts the output lines.
  • -r: Reverses the sort order, placing the largest files at the top.
  • -h: Compares human-readable numbers correctly (e.g., understands that 2G is larger than 10M).
• | head -n 10: Displays only the first 10 lines of the sorted output (the top 10 largest files). 

Alternative: Using Bytes for Precise Sorting

If you need a very precise numeric sort (e.g., if the human-readable sorting behaves unexpectedly on non-GNU systems), you can print sizes in bytes: 

bash

find . -type f -printf "%s %p\n" | sort -nr | head -n 10

This command prints the size in bytes (%s) followed by the file path (%p), sorts numerically (-n) in reverse order (-r), and shows the top 10 results. 

Interactive Method (GUI/TUI)

For an interactive, user-friendly experience, you can use the ncdu tool, which is available in the Ubuntu package manager. 

1. Install ncdu: sudo apt install ncdu.
2. Run in the directory: ncdu . (or a specific path, e.g., ncdu /var/log). This provides an interactive interface to navigate directories and see the largest files and folders.