Commandfind
Find the largest files
Lists every regular file over 100MB anywhere under a directory tree, skipping directories, symlinks and other non-file entries entirely.
Last updated
Commandfind
find . -type f -size +100M
How it works
-type f restricts matches to regular files only, so directories, symlinks and device entries never show up in the results. -size +100M matches anything strictly LARGER than 100 megabytes — the leading + means "greater than," which matters because a bare 100M without it would only match files whose size rounds to exactly that unit, which almost nothing does in practice.
Together this answers "what's actually eating disk space here" without any extra tools — just find's own flags, no piping to du or awk required for the search itself.
Watch out for
- →This doesn't sort the output by size — results come back in whatever order find walks the tree, not biggest-first. Piping through something like -exec ls -lh {} \; combined with sort gets you a ranked list.
- →-printf, which some recipes use to format size and path together for sorting, is a GNU find extension — it doesn't exist on BSD find (macOS's default), where you'd reach for a different combination, like piping to xargs stat -f%z, or installing GNU find (gfind) via coreutils.
- →Symlinked files aren't followed into their targets by default — find reports a symlink's own tiny size, not the size of whatever it points to; add -L before the path to follow links if that's what you actually want measured.