The Unix find command is a very powerful tool, and this short post is intended to show how easy you can achieve something that might look complicate: to find all the files of a particular size. Let’s assume you are searching for all the files of exactly 6579 bytes size inside the home directory. You will just have to run something like:

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find /home/ -type f -size 6579c -exec ls {} \;

As units you can use:

• b – for 512-byte blocks (this is the default if no suffix is used)
• c – for bytes
• w – for two-byte words
• k – for Kilobytes (units of 1024 bytes)
• M – for Megabytes (units of 1048576 bytes)
• G – for Gigabytes (units of 1073741824 bytes)

You can search for exact file size, or just for bigger (+) or smaller (–) files. For example all bigger than 512k files would be found with something like:

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find /home/ -type f -size +512k -exec ls -lh {} \;

I have added here -lh to the ls output so it will actually show the files with their sizes in a nice human readable format. Similar for smaller files you would use -size -512k.