Find the largest file on the filesystem

[Radha13]

Description

An exercise for the candidates to find the largest files on the filesystem on Linux.

Steps to setup

create a big file, there are many options - truncate or dd are most common but not limited.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/largefile bs=4k count=10G

OR

truncate -s 10G /path/to/largefile
(s for size)

Find the largest file

The simplest command to do that is to run du -h /*. The user can add sort -n to get the highest.

One can also us ls -lshR to search recursively.
(R for recursive, l for long list format, s for size, h for human readable)

Note: I didn't use df -h to find the partition first because it might the case there are multiple medium sized file in a partition all adding up to 11G but that doesn't mean this partition has the largest single file with size 10G