The command

If you want to find the largest files within your Linux system, see this post instead. Here is the command to find the top 20 largest folders in a given directory and print their size in a human readable format (eg. 2.4M, 24G).

 

# the full command
du -hx path/to/your/directory | sort -hr | head -20

 

Examples

Find the 20 heaviest directories in your ~/Documents directory and print their human readable size

# replace with the directory you want to scan
sudo du -hx ~/Documents | sort -hr | head -20

Find the top 10 heaviest directories in your entire system and print their human readable size.

# This might take a long time to execute, because you are scanning your entire system
sudo du -hx / | sort -hr | head -10

 

Step-by-step breakdown

You can try each of the following commands for yourself to see the results.

1- find

# find all directories within your current file system (-x) and print their size in a human-readable format (-h)
du -hx ~/Documents

2- sort

# sort by human-readable format (-h) so 2G will be bigger than 50k even if 2 < 5, and reverse the order (-r)
sudo du -hx ~/Documents | sort -hr

3- head -20

# keep the first 20 lines (-20)
sudo du -hx ~/Documents | sort -hr