#Mac os x command line find file how to#
#Mac os x command line find file install#
#Mac os x command line find file full#

Here's how it works: it gets a list of all the files, and passes them to ls -l then awk is used to count up the bytes. (There are no weird forks or xattrs in this set of files.) It's significantly smaller than the value reported by du. This value matches exactly the number reported by Finder's Get Info window. This is kind of slow, but it works: $ find. As expected, it's half the number of 512-byte blocks: $ du -hsįinally, you can use find and awk to give you the sum of actual bytes in the files. The -h flag results in a more readable number, in kilobytes. If you have a lot of small files, the difference can be large. This tells you the space on disk, which is larger than the amount of data. To exit a man page and get back to where you can enter a command, press the key 'q'.The BSD version of du used in OS X reports size with 512-byte blocks - the sizes are essentially rounded up to the next 512-byte value.

#Mac os x command line find file how to#

The man page will explain how to use nano.

If you do not know how to use nano, first bring up its man(ual) page by typing man nano Then, upon saving the file and exiting that Terminal window and opening a new Terminal window, typing 'lss' in the command line should provide that which you seek routinely when listing files. bash_profile file, (eg using nano to open this file, and doing so while you are in your home directory).įor example, to fulfill that desired by the original poster of the question, open the file and on a fresh line add: alias lss='ls -hlS'

If you want to list files regularly in one of the above formats, or another of your choice upon reading the man page, you can add an alias to your. These options, and more, are in the man (manual) page for the ls command: man ls Hence even if the list in your current directory is long such that the beginning of the list can no longer be read without scrolling up, the files you have interacted with will likely remain visible immediately above your next, ready to type in, command line.

#Mac os x command line find file full#

The full combination means that you have a detailed list, with the files that you have read, opened or modified most recently, or been 'touched' similarly by a process you have run or another process, all at the bottom of the list. The 'r' then reverse the order of the list so that the more recently accessed or 'touched' files are listed last, at the bottom of the list. The 'u' then alters this slightly to use the time the files were last accessed, rather than last modified. The 't' instructs the sort order of the files by their last modified date/times. This lists files in human readable file size format, in a long list down the Terminal window. If your creating and editing files in the current directory often, perhaps because you are in the process of working on a task or project, an alternative combination is: ls -hltur If you want invisible files listed as well then add an 'a': ls -alhSĪgain the letters after the '-' can be in any order. If, as the question detail states, one wants the file list to be ordered by file size, largest file size at the top, then add a capital 'S': ls -lhS The letters after the '-' can be in any order in this instance.

If you want human readable file sizes, simply add an 'h': ls -hl (If I am wrong, someone correct me.)įor example, to get a list of files in the current directory, as a single column list, and showing file details, enter: ls -l

#Mac os x command line find file install#

To my understanding in later OSX editions, using brew to install coreutils is not required. A better answer to this question 2 years on (using Terminal in OSX 10.11) is to simply add -h to the ls command to get human readable file sizes.