Scripting: Finding Large Files with biggest.sh

Biggest.sh searches a given file system and lists the biggest files it finds in size order — biggest first — displaying up to 500 lines of output. Five hundred lines of output may be a bit much, but biggest comes with a suite of options, one of which (-l) allows you to specify precisely how many lines you want returned. We do exactly that with our monitoring software. When a file system reaches alert level, we have the monitoring program call biggest.sh like this: biggest.sh -l 10 /usr. This returns the ten "biggest" files in /usr.