Can I find all files with the .log extension and order by file size?

Question

I'm using CentOS 6.8

I'd like to know if I can I find all files with the .log extension and order by file size and display the file size next to the filename?

I'm currently using this command to find all files with the .log extension:

find .  -name \*.log

Answer 1

This seems to work for me:

find .  -name \*.log -ls | sort -r -n -k7

where...

find = https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/find.1.html

. = current folder

-name = allows you to search for a file name pattern, in this case the asterisk is preceded by a slash to allow it to be a wildcard.

-ls = lists output in ls -dils format.

sort = https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/sort.1.html

-r = reverses the results, going biggest to smallest

-n = compares them as a numerical value

-k = sorts on a field, in this case the 7th field has the size variable in the output

You could also add | head -n 20 to the end of this to get the top/largest 20 files.

Answer 2

Here are two options; one bash-centric and one just for fun.

---

( shopt -s globstar dotglob; stat --format "%s %n" -- **/*.log | sort -rn )

This:

• runs in a sub-shell, so that the shopt statements don't affect the current/running shell.
• sets the globstar and dotglob shell options; globstar enables the use of the ** syntax to match files in subdirectories; dotglob enables the shell globbing to match directories that start with a .
• stat is how we gather the file sizes with their names; it's installed by default on CentOS systems -- it is not POSIX-specified.
• the real work here is done by the globstar **/*.log, which gathers matching filenames (*.log) in the current directory and any subdirectories.
• we then reverse-numerically sort the file sizes & names to get the largest files first (use -n without the r to sort them in ascending-size order).

Another bash-centric option, but one that also exercises an ls flag to sort its arguments by size:

shopt -s globstar dotglob
ls -lS **/*.log

# or, in reverse:

ls -lrS **/*.log

---

To exercise your system and your patience, you could search for files of a specific size in a certain order:

for((i=9223372036854775807;i>=0;i--)); do find . -name \*.log -size ${i}c -exec stat --format "%s %n" {} + ; done

This runs 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (over 9 quintillion) find commands, looking for *.log files of every possible size, again calling stat to display just the file sizes and names. In case there are multiple files of the same size, I included find's {} + syntax to pass as many filenames to stat as will fit in the environment. You may have to adjust the for loop range based on your shell's integer size, or if you know how large the largest log file might be. This "option" has the "benefit" of being able to be POSIX-compliant if you replace the stat call with a simple ls.

Answer 3

Kindly run below command for listing all folders named log along with size.

du -csh $(find / -type d -iname log)

Answer 4

With zsh:

zmodload zsh/stat
stat -n +size -- **/*.log(DN-.oL)

Answer 5

Try this command:

 find .  -name \*.log |ls -lSh