bigfiles

List the biggest files or folders under a path.

Synopsis

bigfiles [options] [path ...] [-- find tests]

Description

When a disk fills up, the first question is what is taking the space. bigfiles answers it. It lists the 20 biggest files under a path, biggest first, with the size, the age and the path. With no path it looks in the current folder.

   90KB    40d  ./VMs/debian-13.qcow2
   60KB   120d  ./Downloads/iso/debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
   60KB     3d  ./Downloads/ubuntu-24.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso
3 files, 210KB together

The age is the time since the file last changed, in seconds, minutes, hours, days or years (s, m, h, d, y). A 40 GB VM image last changed a year ago is a better thing to clean up than one you used this morning.

With -d, it lists the folders one level down instead, by the total size of everything in them. Run it on /var, find the biggest folder, then run it again on that folder.

bigfiles only reads. It never deletes, moves or changes a file.

Options

A pattern without a / matches a name, the way find -name does, so -x .git skips every .git folder. A pattern with a / matches the path, the way find -path does. Quote patterns with * so the shell does not expand them.

How it measures

For files, the size is the size of the content, from stat. That is the number ls -l shows.

For folders, -d asks du -s for the space the folder takes on disk. The two can differ. A sparse VM image of 40 GB may take only 8 GB on disk, and a folder of many tiny files takes more than their sizes add up to, because each file uses at least one 4 KB block. Both numbers are right. They answer different questions.

For a folder, the age is the time since a name in it was added, removed or renamed. It does not change when a file inside is edited.

One filesystem at a time

By default bigfiles stays on the filesystem the path is on. bigfiles / looks at your root filesystem and skips /home when that is a separate partition, along with USB drives, network shares and /boot/efi. Run it again on /home to see that one. -a crosses into all of them.

/proc and /sys are always skipped, even with -a. They hold no real files, and the sizes they report are meaningless, such as the 128 TB that /proc/kcore claims.

Safety checks

• bigfiles never changes anything.
• It never follows symlinks, so a link to another disk cannot count that disk twice.
• Options after -- go to find as extra tests. The ones that act on files, -delete, -exec, -execdir, -ok, -okdir, -fprint, -fprint0, -fprintf and -fls, are refused with exit 4.
• Folders you cannot read are skipped. At the end, bigfiles says how many it could not read, so a short list is never a silent one.

Distro notes

On Debian and Ubuntu, /var/cache/apt/archives often holds a few GB of old packages. sudo apt clean empties it. On Fedora, sudo dnf clean all does the same for /var/cache/dnf, and on Arch, paccache -r trims /var/cache/pacman/pkg.

On every systemd distro, the journal in /var/log/journal can grow to several GB. journalctl --disk-usage shows its size, and sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=200M trims it.

On a machine with Docker, most of the space sits in /var/lib/docker, which bigfiles shows as one large folder. docker system df explains it better, and docker system prune frees it.

Pass-through

For files, options after -- go to find as extra tests. This finds big files that have not changed in 90 days:

$ bigfiles ~/Downloads -- -mtime +90

Other useful tests are -name '*.iso', -user www-data and -newer file. They do not work with -d.

Needs

find, stat and sort, plus du for -d. Every distro ships them in findutils and coreutils, and BusyBox has all four.

ncdu is optional. When it is installed, bigfiles ends with a line that suggests it:

To browse the tree, run: ncdu -x .

ncdu lets you walk the tree with the arrow keys and delete from inside it. The package is ncdu on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch and Alpine. On RHEL, Rocky and Alma it is in EPEL.

Examples

The biggest files here

$ bigfiles -n 3
   90KB    40d  ./VMs/debian-13.qcow2
   60KB   120d  ./Downloads/iso/debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
   60KB     3d  ./Downloads/ubuntu-24.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso
3 files, 210KB together

Which folder is biggest

$ bigfiles -d
  120KB     6m  ./Downloads
   92KB     6m  ./VMs
   32KB     6m  ./Videos
   12KB     6m  ./.cache
4 folders, 256KB together

Leave some names out

$ bigfiles -x '*.iso'
   90KB    40d  ./VMs/debian-13.qcow2
   30KB     5h  ./Videos/talk-raw.mp4
   12KB     6m  ./.cache/pip/wheel.whl
     2B     6m  ./notes.txt
4 files, 132KB together

Only old files

$ bigfiles -- -mtime +30
   90KB    40d  ./VMs/debian-13.qcow2
   60KB   120d  ./Downloads/iso/debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
2 files, 150KB together

See the command it runs

$ bigfiles -v -n 2 Downloads
+ find -P Downloads -xdev '(' -path /proc -o -path /sys ')' -prune -o -type f -exec stat -c '%s %Y %n' -- '{}' +
   60KB   120d  Downloads/iso/debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
   60KB     3d  Downloads/ubuntu-24.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso
2 files, 120KB together

Folders it could not read

$ bigfiles -n 2
   90KB    40d  ./VMs/debian-13.qcow2
   60KB   120d  ./Downloads/iso/debian-13.1.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
bigfiles: could not read 1 path, run it with sudo to include them
2 files, 150KB together

Nothing that big

$ bigfiles -m 1G ~/projects
No files of 1GB or more.

Troubleshooting

bigfiles: could not read 3 paths, run it with sudo to include them

Some folders belong to root or another user. For system folders such as /var, run sudo bigfiles -d /var.

bigfiles: refused, -delete after -- would act on files, and bigfiles only lists them

bigfiles only lists. Delete what you choose with rm, or move it to the trash with gio trash.

bigfiles: options after -- work for files, not with -d

du measures whole folders, so find tests have nothing to filter. Drop -d, or drop the options after --.

df says the disk is full, but bigfiles / finds little

The space may be on another filesystem, so run it on /home or /var too. It may also be held by a deleted file that a program still has open, such as a log file. sudo lsof +L1 lists those. Restarting the program frees the space.

It is slow on /

The first run reads every folder on the disk. Start with bigfiles -d /, then look inside the biggest folder.

Exit status

See also

dupes, du(1), df(1), ncdu(1)