Find the 50 largest files in the current directory and all its subdirectories, including hidden files. Sort by size in bytes before converting the results to readable units.

find -type f selects regular files. %s prints the size in bytes and %p the path, separated by a tab. sort -nr puts the largest files first, head -n 50 keeps up to 50 results, and numfmt formats the first column using powers of 1024.

On macOS, use the built-in find and stat commands to list the 50 largest files with their sizes in bytes. No additional tools are required:

For human-readable sizes such as 1K, 25M or 3G (powers of 1024), install the additional GNU tools findutils and coreutils with Homebrew, then use this alternative:

These are apparent file sizes, which can differ from allocated disk usage reported by du. Symbolic links are not followed. This line-based command is intended for terminal inspection; filenames containing tabs or newlines can make the output ambiguous.

macOS packages: findutils and coreutils.