Find large files on Linux OS

If you work with Linux VM's, you know it can be a pain to find some deeply hidden large files sucking away at your storage. Fear not, use du.

sudo du -shx /* | sort -h

It will return something like:

...
4K  /opt
72K /root
764K    /run
29M /etc
39M /boot
256M    /home
889M    /usr
33G /var

Looks like our /var folder could use some further inspection, lets adjust our command:

sudo du -shx /var/* | sort -h

Then we see something like:

...
60K /var/spool
224M    /var/cache
6.2G    /var/log
27G /var/lib

It appears we have two more directories worthy of further digging.

We can adjust our command again to inspect /var/lib/* or /var/log/* respectively.

Good luck!