Linux Tips: find all files of a particular size

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:

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:

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.

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