Macos – Sort All Files (any depth) within a Folder by Size

file managementfindermacos

I have a folder full of folders and files. I want to sort files by size (so I could remove the largest files).

I know how to do that in Windows Explorer, but I can not find a way to do it in Mac OS X Finder.

Windows 2003:

open folder in Windows Explorer
click button Search
leave Search for files or folders named and Containing text text fields empty
click button Search Now
sort by size

Is there a way to do something like this in Finder on Mac OS X?

Best Answer

Open Terminal, cd to the folder you want to analyze and use this command:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l | sort -k5,5rn

It should print a list of all files in the hierarchy, sorted by size. At least on my machine, which is not a Mac, but some other Unix. But in principal it should be roughly the same.

Thanks to Richard Hoskins for the bug with the spaces in the names. That's actually a feature in xargs. See this site where it's explained quite nicely. Above version should work now.

Edit

Here is an explanation how the command works:

find . ==> find items from current working directory "."

-type f ==> search for regular files

-print0 ==> print full file name to standard out, ending with a null character, instead of newline (this is for handling filenames with newlines and white space by xargs)

xargs ==> execute command xargs (executes a command for every line in standard in)

-0 ==> line delimiter is null character

ls -l ==> the command for xargs to execute. This way we get the details especially the size of the files.

sort ==> sort lines in standard in

-k5,5rn ==> sort field definition, begin at field 5 (delimiter default is blank) and end at field 5. That's the size field in ls -l display. r stands for reverse sort order, so that the biggest files are on top and n stands for numerical sort order.

Deleting `.DS_Store` Recursively in Folders

My frustration and confusion from seeing folders open not using my defaults appears to have stemmed from old .DS_Store files from folders that I had copied over from an older machine. To resolve, I recursively deleted the folders as follows using Terminal:

cd ~/Folder with bad views
sudo find . -name ".DS_Store" -depth -exec rm {} \;

Kudos to the Adobe TechNote Removing .DS_Store files on Macintosh OS X? for providing this command to delete recursively.

Macos – How to create a new folder within a nested folder hierarchy using Finder

One (very unrecommended) option would be to assign a shortcut to an AppleScript like this. There's an open bug in 10.7 that makes the script more or less unusable.

tell application "Finder"
    if insertion location as alias is desktop as alias or current view of Finder window 1 is in {icon view, column view} or selection is {} then
        tell application "System Events" to tell process "Finder"
            click menu item "New Folder" of menu 1 of menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1
        end tell
        return
    end if
    tell application "System Events" to key code 124 -- right arrow
    set p to item 1 of (get selection)
    try
        set f to make new folder at p
    on error
        set f to make new folder at container of p
    end try
    set selection to f
end tell
tell application "System Events" to keystroke return

Best Answer

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