How To Find Files Bigger Or Smaller Than X Size In Linux

Let us say you want to find files that are less than or greater than a certain size in your Linux system. How would  you do that? Manually check each and every file's size? No, it is time consuming task. Besides, a good system admin won't do it. There is always an easiest and fastest way to do things in Linux. This brief tutorial covers how to find files bigger or smaller than X size in Linux and Unix operating systems.

Find Files Bigger Or Smaller Than X Size

Using find command, we can also easily find files bigger or smaller than given size.

For instance, to find files that are bigger than 4GB in a directory, just enter:

$ find . -type f -size +4G

Sample Output:

./VirtualBox VMs/Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop/Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop.vdi
./VirtualBox VMs/Ubuntu 16.04 Server/Ubuntu 16.04 Server.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Antergos/Antergos.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/FreeBSD 10.3 MATE desktop/FreeBSD 10.3 MATE desktop.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Fedora 23 desktop/Fedora 23 desktop.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Fedora 23 desktop/.goutputstream-UT19IY
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/openSUSE 42.1 Leap Desktop/openSUSE 42.1 Leap Desktop.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Ubuntu 17.04 server/Ubuntu 17.04 server.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Fedora 23_/Fedora 23 .vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop/Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Ubuntu 14.04 LTS desktop/Ubuntu 14.04 LTS desktop.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Debian 8 Desktop/Debian 8 Desktop.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/FreeBSD 10.3 server/FreeBSD 10.3 server.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/OpenMandriva Lx 3 desktop/OpenMandriva Lx 3 desktop.vdi
./Soft_Backup/VHD's/Elementary OS_/Elementary OS_.vdi
./Soft_Backup/OS Images/Linux/openSUSE-Leap-42.1-DVD-x86_64.iso/openSUSE-Leap-42.1-DVD-x86_64.iso
[...]

As you can see, I have some files with size bigger than 4GiB. Here, the dot (.) indicates the current directory.

To search for files bigger than 4 GiB in the entire filesystem, run:

$ find / -type f -size +4G

To know files bigger than X size in a specific directory, replace the dot (.) in the above command with the directory path like below.

$ find Downloads/ -type f -size +4G

The above command find files bigger than 4GiB in Downloads directory.

Similarly, to find the files which are smaller than X size, for example 4GiB, use the following command:

$ find . -type f -size -4G

You can use size switch for other formats, such as

• 'c' for bytes
• 'w' for two-byte words
• 'k' for Kilobytes
• 'M' for Megabytes
• 'G' for Gigabytes

For example, to find files which are bigger than 4MB, use the following command:

$ find . -type f -size +4M

To find files smaller than 4MB, use this command:

$ find . -type f -size -4M

You might wonder how to find files between a certain size. For instance, you can find files between 30MB and 40MB using the following command:

$ find -size +30M -size -40M

To find files of exact size, for example 30MB, run:

$ find -size 30M

For more details, refer man pages.

$ man find

Update:

As one of the reader mentioned in the comment section below, the find command can also display a long listing of all the files it finds by using the -exec switch. The command below will find all of the files between 30M and 40M, and display a long listing of each file.

$ find . -type f -size +30M -size -40M -exec ls -l {} +

Do you know any other useful and easiest way to find files which are smaller or bigger than a particular size? Please feel free to comment them in comment section below.