Listing files and folders sorted by size

Sort files and directories by size on disk

The following command sorts files and directories in descending order by their disk usage:

du -hs * | sort -rh

Explanation

du

du summarizes disk usage of files, and for directories it summarizes them recursively. The -s option tells du to display “only a total for each argument”. Without it, du also displays recursively the sizes of each nested directory. So for the following file structure

$ tree .
.
├── dir1
│   ├── dir11
│   │   └── file
│   ├── dir12
│   │   └── file
│   └── file
├── dir2
│   └── file
├── file1
├── file2
├── file3
└── file4

du without -s would output the following

$ du -h *
260K    dir1/dir11
516K    dir1/dir12
908K    dir1
260K    dir2
16K     file1
32K     file2
1.0M    file3
64K     file4

And -h options makes the sizes human readable rather than in bytes. So du without -h would output the following

$ du -s *
908     dir1
260     dir2
16      file1
32      file2
1024    file3
64      file4

sort

sort utility sorts lines from standard input. The -r options tells it to reverse the result, i.e., sort in descending order. And the -h option tells it to interpret human readable file size, i.e., understand that 1G is larger then 10K.