Find largest files on your hard drive (Windows & Linux)

Posted by sood on Monday, November 24th, 2008 in Linux/Unix, Windows XP

Are you running low on disk space or just curious to know what files are eating up your hard drive space? Finding out the biggest files in your hard drive is simple. This article will show you how to do this on Windows XP and Linux/Unix.

Windows XP

  1. Go to Start / Search / For Files or Folders
  2. Select the search option All Files and Folders
  3. Enter *.* in the file name search box
  4. Select the hard drive(s) you would like to search
  5. (Optional) Select the What size is it? option and choose Large
  6. Click the Search button
  7. Click the Size column to sort the results

Linux/Unix

Running the command below on a Linux/Unix machine (or Cygwin) will return the top 10 largest files recursively from the current path

find . -printf '%s %pn'|sort -nr|head

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{ 4 Comments }

  1. Nice simple method.But there are a few files which will not show up in the explorer view and you have to use a software called WIndirStat.My 20 Gb was missing from my hard disk and had a tough time which folder was using this.Found the answer here:http://sunil-bhaskar.blogspot.com/2010/08/windows-7-eating-disk-spacefinally-real.html

  2. Embarrassed i didn’t think of it

  3. Great way to quickly find out what is eating up all the space.
    THANK YOU!

  4. simple and spot on, thanks so much

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