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up vote 9 down vote favorite

How to locate large files (> 100 MB) in /home/ for 'cleaning'?

It's Centos 6.x. I tried some commands, but they didn't work.

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15  
So which commands did you try? – Decado Sep 16 '12 at 8:39

4 Answers

up vote 30 down vote accepted

Find has it's own -delete option so

find /home -type f -size +100M -delete

should do what you want. Just be careful about where you put the -delete option

Warnings: Don’t forget that the find command line is evaluated as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.

If you want to test this before using it then you need to add -depth as -delete implies it.

find /home -type f -size +100M -depth
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For future visitors who may not be on CentOS: Both the modern GNU and BSD variants of find (1) (including that of OS X) support the -delete flag, but it is not part of the standard. If you should need an alternative, use -depth -exec rm {} +. – kojiro Sep 16 '12 at 23:04
Good to know! I was not aware the -delete flag could be used to locate large files... It seems I don't have any... Strange ;) ;) ;) – befreeandgood Sep 18 '12 at 0:30
@EricDANNIELOU: Your point being ? – Iain♦ Sep 18 '12 at 6:11
up vote 9 down vote

Just find: find /home -type f -size +100M

find and remove find /home -type f -size +100M -print0 |xargs -0 rm

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up vote 6 down vote

ncdu is a nice interactive tool to find big files or directories. It will scan a given directory and show a simple ncurses interface to present sizes of directories. It also has a shortcut to delete a file/directory.

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find, du and awk have an advantage of being standard – nponeccop Sep 16 '12 at 21:21
1  
And ncdu has the advantage of being interactive. – liori Sep 16 '12 at 21:23
I've used ncdu for disk cleanup too! It's just great! – Meysam Sep 17 '12 at 7:00
up vote 5 down vote 
du /home | awk '$1 > 1234 { print }'

It searches not for large files but for large folders. In case of running out of file space I try to look both for large files and large folders to identify problematic areas.

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1  
du -a will have it print both individual files and folders' totals. Also, on many file systems, you need to add -k to make it print the size in KiB instead of arbitrary block-size counts, so I always include -k as a force of habit. – fluffy Sep 16 '12 at 16:33

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