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I am trying to find a command that displays files larger than 1 GB and displays those files ordered by size. I have tried find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -size +1G -print0 |xargs -0 du -h |sort -rh but for some reason this displays files of size that are not greater than 1 GB. For example this is in the output 1.0K ./<repo>/.git/info

Jeff Schaller
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griffin_cosgrove
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1 Answers1

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There are at least two possible causes:

  1. Maybe your find prints nothing. In this case xargs runs du -h which is equivalent to du -h .. Investigate --no-run-if-empty option of GNU xargs. Or better get used to find … -exec … instead of find … | xargs …. Like this:

    find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -size +1G -exec du -h {} + | sort -rh

  2. find -size tests (almost) what du --apparent-size shows, while du without this option may greatly disagree, especially when the file is sparse. The option is not portable.

I think in your case the first cause is the culprit. Note ./<repo>/.git/info couldn't come from find . -maxdepth 2 -type f because its depth is 3. This means du operated recursively on some directory.

Kamil Maciorowski
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  • Brilliant! ```find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -size +1G -exec du -h {} + | sort -rh``` works as expected. Are there any implications I should be aware of when running ```find ... -exec``` instead of ```find … | xargs …```? New to this area, appreciate any knowledge. – griffin_cosgrove Dec 07 '20 at 17:02
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    @griffin_cosgrove I find `find -exec` more straightforward than `find … | xargs …` because `xargs` has its options and quirks. Read good answers [here](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/389705/108618) and [here](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/156008/108618). – Kamil Maciorowski Dec 07 '20 at 17:44
  • thanks! this has been helpful – griffin_cosgrove Dec 17 '20 at 23:35