How to find largest files in a dir - ignoring directory sizes

Question

I want to do something like this

du -a | sort -rn | head

But I want to extract files only, ignoring directories.

To be clear, I want to traverse through all sub-directories but I don't want to find directory sizes. Just files sizes.

UPDATE

I also want to return the full path of the files

Answer 1

This should work:

find <path> -type f -exec du -a{} + | sort -rn | head

Taken from http://unix-linux.itags.org/q_unix-linux-programming_84920.html

Answer 2

One way to find the largest file in a directory:

find . -type f | xargs ls -1S | head -n 1

Answer 3

I just want to add my solution although it's not as complete as the one by @Michael Plotke

ls -lR | egrep "^-" | awk '{ print $5, "\t", $8 }' | sort -rn | head

UPDATE 1

I've now had to use this script on BSD unix (which I did not originally intended to do) and found Michael's solution doesn't work.

By incorporating @steve's solution into mine, this solution is more usable on BSD systems:

find . -type f | xargs ls -lS | awk '{ print $5, "\t", $9 }' | head

UPDATE 2

Further refinement. Resolves issues with unusual filenames (eg. spaces)

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lS | awk '{ print $5, "\t", $9 }' | head

Note: I found this solution to be significantly faster on WSL (windows subsystem Linux) than the accepted solution.

In a directory with about 1000 files, this solution takes seconds whereas the accepted answer took tens of minutes.