Josh Wieder

It was one of these days, not long ago, that I work up one day and realized that I had become an Old Man. Mine is the last generation that remembers a time prior to the internet. I remember using acoustic couplers. My first laptop, a Toshiba, had dual 5 1/2 inch floppy drives, but had no hard drive. I was so excited when I got my hands on that machine. It meant I could connect to networks using my acoustic coupler from a pay phone! My ruminations on aging is at least somewhat related to the topic at hand. You see, among the memories rattling around my grey hair ensconced head are a few about searching Windows file systems for files of specific types. This sort of thing is very important, even just for every day normal computer usage. When your computer starts running out of space, wouldn't it be nice to be able to find all of the really large files on that computer? Or perhaps you are looking for an important document you wrote - you can't remember the name of the file but ...

Here is a quick tip for all of those Redhat/CentOS/Fedora users out there. Do you need to find all files over a certain size, either in a specific directory, your current directory, or in your entire computer/server? No problem, just execute the following: find / -type f -size +500000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }' In the example above, I am looking for all files over 500MB in size (500000k, where k = kilobytes). The place where I have typed "/" in the above command indicates the path to search in. By selecting "/" I am searching in the entire filesystem; I could easily indicate a specific directory by changing my command as follows: find /path/to/my/directory -type f -size +500000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }' Alternatively, I could search in my current directory by replacing "/" with "." like so: find . -type f -size +500000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ pri...