Mac OSX : Find large files by size




Mac OS X prompted me about my startup disk running out of disk space. I need a quick way to see which files need to be deleted and below are two ways that I used to search for large files.

1) Click on Finder icon

Mac OS Finder

2) Select "All My Files", then navigate to "Show Search Criteria"

navigate to show search criteria

3) Click on the "Kind" selector and change to "File Size". If "File Size" is not available, select "Other..." and search for "File Size"

4) Enter let say for example, enter 10 MB and hit enter to start searching. It will take a while before you will see any result.

IF you prefer command line, open up your terminal and enter this line :

sudo find / -type f -size +100000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }'

NOTE : Adjust the file size +100000k according to your own search criteria

NOTE : sudo is to invoke root access and you might need to enter your root password when prompted

Sample output :

 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/XUL: 136M
 /Applications/Google: 103M
 /Applications/Google: 103M
 find: /dev/fd/3: Not a directory
 find: /dev/fd/4: Not a directory
 /private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_i386: 256M
 /private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64: 368M
 /private/var/run/diagnosticd/dyld_shared_cache_i386: 256M
 /private/var/run/diagnosticd/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64: 368M
 /private/var/vm/swapfile0: 1.0G
 /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd/data: 695M




By Adam Ng

IF you gain some knowledge or the information here solved your programming problem. Please consider donating to the less fortunate or some charities that you like. Apart from donation, planting trees, volunteering or reducing your carbon footprint will be great too.


Advertisement