[SOLVED] Tech Support Request: Finding the biggest files of a specific type

I'm (very) far from a Bash expert, but here's the somewhat hacky solution I came up with:

find . -type f -printf '%s %p\n' | grep -Ei "(png|jpg|jpeg)" | sort -n -r

I think it's always good to have some of these Unix commands in your toolbelt, so here's a quick breakdown:

find . -type f -printf '%s %p\n'

Recursively lists all the files in nested directories. Usually this will only print out the filename, but we can make it print filesize and filename by passing a custom format string with the -printf flag. Here, %s is the size in bytes of the file, %p is the filename, and \n will just make sure each file is on one line. Here's an example output:

204164852 ./Daft Punk/Daft Punk - R.A.M. (Half-Inch 15 IPS Master Reel)/3 Giorgio By Moroder.flac
3289016 ./Daft Punk/Daft Punk - R.A.M. (Half-Inch 15 IPS Master Reel)/DPramHQcover.png
104411141 ./Daft Punk/Daft Punk - R.A.M. (Half-Inch 15 IPS Master Reel)/1 Give Life Back To Music.flac
[...]

Notice that this isn't sorted by filesize yet, and it's not filtering by filetype yet.

grep -Ei "(png|jpg|jpeg)"

Now we pipe the output from find into grep and use a regex to filter the filetype. -E lets you pass a regex without having to escape a bunch of characters, and -i does a case-insensitive match. Now the output will only contain image files:

3289016 ./Daft Punk/Daft Punk - R.A.M. (Half-Inch 15 IPS Master Reel)/DPramHQcover.png
89040 ./Daft Punk/Daft Punk - Discovery (2001) [24bit]/folder.jpg
1640619 ./fusq/fusq - Lost Station/cover.png
[...]

sort -n -r

Finally we can sort the filtered list of files. This is simple, since each file's size is at the start of each line. -n tells sort to do a numerical sort (as opposed to alphabetical), and -r reverses the sort so that it goes from largest -> smallest.

Like other commenters posted, a better solution is to just install a tool that will get this done quicker (and probably better), but hacking together Bash scripts can be fun :)

(btw if anyone has any recommendations or tricks that could improve feel free to add them below!)

Edit: fix typo

Try installing fd, and running fd cover.* --size +10m Music/.

If you need to narrow it down more, run man fd, and take a look at the options there. The --size section is particularly helpful (to jump to it, type /size).

edit: the binary may be called fdfind instead of fd.

Lazy bash expert here, for an additional option: du.

When I have to play "which folder is hogging all the space," I'll often run du -max-depth=1|sort -n to find the biggest folder in a directory and drill down.

For your case, I'd probably use du | sort -n | grep -i jpg. Lists all the jpg, puts the biggest at the bottom. You can get fancy using -E like @what showed, but I'll often just pass through grep again for subsequent filters as needed. grep -v is also great for excluding results.

imagemagick is also a great tool to help you on this quest. Makes short work of shrinking large images from the CLI, no downloading needed.

Might not be useful here, but this is straightforward intree :

tree -shaP "*.png|*.jpeg" --sort=size gives you a directory tree of your current directory with any .png/.jpeg files listed as well, sorted by filesize. I like tree when grokking small to medium sized directories but depending on how much music you have there are probably better options.

Y'all have wayyyyyyy overcomplicated this:

find . -name "cover.*" -size +500K

Edit: Reduce 5M to 500K.
You might also want to replace -name with -iname to make it case-insensitive.

@petrichor’s suggestion is good because it is very specific to your needs. I might also suggest ncdu as I find it is very useful for finding what is hogging disk space and drilling down into directories that contain the most amount of accumulated junk when you don’t know exactly what is hogging disk space (so it can be used in a more exploratory fashion). You provide a -x exclude pattern to ncdu to tell it not to size things that match your pattern, so you can focus on everything else.

If you want something with a gui, fsearch works well. Once it indexes, I have ctrl+alt+f set to bring up a search window and any mp3 is a click away. It has a standard file browser interface and can sort by size, type, modification date, etc. Angrysearch works also but just a bit slower in my experience.