*nix: find the largest files/directories within a directory

Every now and then I’m searching for this little snippet in my notes using NotationalVelocity (or currently actually a fork):

du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -100

It’s a variation of a snippet I found somewhere, but hardly invested any time in understanding what it actually does. Let’s decompose, from head to taildu.

head

head -100

head simply limits the results to a maximum of 100 lines. Not much more to explain here

sort

sort sorts. by default it sorts the files by filename, but adding ‘-h’ to it allows it to sort by “human readable numbers” (e.g. 5M > 6K); if ‘-n’ would be added as option 6K would be > 5M. The ‘-r’ options reverses the sort wich is by default ascending.

du

du by defaults crawls a directory recursively for all files. passing '-s' tells it to sum the values of files within directories. the '-x' option is used to n…

How to do it: Using screen

A technical note to myself: One way of doing multiple things simultanenously on a server can be by setting up multiple connections via SSH, that's how I used to do things before. An alternative is to use a single connection and use the command screen on the remote server. Another good reason to use screen is if you have a long running process that you don't want to break just because your SSH connection flips on and off with your computer going in and out of stand-by.

This is for absolute beginners. If you don't know about screen, this is for you. If you are already familiar with screen, I probably won't be able to educate you :o

So what is Screen?

GNU Screen is a kind of window managment system for the terminal (you're ought to say terminal multiplexer) and has several advantages over using multiple SSH connections. Most importantly: the processes keep running when SSH d…