21 January 2010
Find files larger than X and delete them in Mac OS/Unix terminal
Another terminal oneliner I've just used to delete files larger than 10mb.
So if you need to delete some files larger than X mb on your Mac or some unix server, here is the simple oneliner to do it, in this example we're looking for files larger than 10mb in current folder (and subfolders, because find command is recursive) and delete them:
find ./ -size +10000000c -exec rm {} \;
And to be sure that you'll be deleting the right files, you can first list them like this:
find ./ -size +10000000c -exec ls -la {} \;
Comments
Thank you!
Was looking for this... very helpful.
Wow. I accidently ran this thinking it would prompt me first. Whoops. Now I deleted a lot of files and they aren't in the trash bin. Uh oh!
awesome, works in linux too
thanks!!
I think you should put a big warning before your rm command that if you type this and hit return, EVERY file larger than 10MB will be deleted FOREVER.
Thanks a lot, I didn't know about this "-size" option.
To return files smaller than Y, just use minus (-) instead of plus (+).
Ex: find ./ -size +10000000c -30000000c -exec ls -la {} \;
I'm using find on linux but on mac I use a tool called "toucan search" (I got it on the mac app store), it's like find but with a gui so it's easier to use. So if I want to do some clean up I just look for * (the wildcard that means "everything") then I sort the files by size and delete the big files I don't need anymore (.dmg I forgot to delete, etc).