Locate Largest Files Top 10

Luke Hebert

- One minute read - 191 words

Disk space fills up faster than you expect, and the first question is always the same: what is taking all that room? The command below walks a directory tree, sorts by size, and hands you the top ten offenders in one shot.

The Command

du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10

What Each Piece Does

  • du -a /var - reports disk usage for every file and directory under /var.
  • sort -n -r - sorts the output numerically in reverse order, so the largest entries come first.
  • head -n 10 - keeps only the first ten lines.

Tips

  • Swap /var for any path you want to inspect, such as /home, /opt, or /.
  • Add --exclude to du if you want to skip known large directories like /var/lib/docker.
  • Pipe through awk '{print $1, $2}' if you want a cleaner two-column output.
Note

du reports sizes in 1024-byte blocks by default. Add the -h flag to get human-readable units (K, M, G) if you prefer.

This is a go-to when a server starts throwing “No space left on device” errors and you need a fast answer before digging deeper.