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I have a fairly large directory tree whose contents I am not familiar with, and I have reason to believe that there are some enormously large directories buried in there somewhere. How do I find where they are?

Context: I am cleaning up a web application that has left behind a lot of files over the years. I already found and cleared a directory that contained hundreds of thousands of tiny ancient "session.*" files, but find commands over the hierarchy are still extremely slow.

The tree is large enough that ls -RC | less is not an attractive solution. If I was looking for a directory taking up a lot of disk space, I would divide and conquer using du -s *. How can I find the directories that contain the largest number of files?

Edit: This is on an old server, so I cannot use du --inodes to count the files. For most readers that's probably the best solution.

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3 Answers 3

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du --inodes *

man du:

 --inodes list inode usage information instead of block usage
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  • Sounds great, but unfortunately my du has no --inodes option and no differently named option to count files. (This is on a rather old Debian distribution.) Any other ideas? Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 13:23
  • @alexis It would be better if that kind of caveats were in the question itself. Can you specify which Debian release you are on? Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 13:41
  • @Michael, apologies -- I hadn't realized that there was a solution in other versions of du! Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 13:53
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On an old distribution without du --inodes,

find . -type d -ls | sort -n -k7,7

will list all directories in order of increasing size, so you'll get the directories with the most files (or which contained the most files at some point) at the end of the list. The find command might well take a while to run but there's not much that can be done about that — even a divide-and-conquer du approach would have to read the same amount of information from the disk.

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  • Nice, thanks! I was just putting together a find -exec commandline that counts the number of files in each directory with wc, then sorted; yours is close enough, and much simpler :-). And I can use sort -rn to get the large directories first. Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 13:54
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You can use 

du --inodes * |sort -nr

du --inodes * will give the number of files by directoryand sort -nr will sort this number in decreasing order

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  • Sounds great, but unfortunately my du has no --inodes option and no differently named option to count files. (This is on a rather old Debian distribution.) Any other ideas? Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 13:23
  • du -bh |sort -nr |tail -n 20 Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 13:37
  • this command will give you the top 20 directories or files ordered by disk space occupied Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 13:39
  • That's a great suggestion, @Dababi. But I'd combine it with find . -type d in order to ignore regular files. Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 13:55

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