Find largest files recursively

Try using find's -print0 or -printf option in combination with xargs like this:

find /music -iname "*\.mp3" -print0 | xargs -0 mpg321

How this works is explained by find's manual page:

-print0

True; print the full file name on the standard output, followed by a null character (instead of the newline character that -print uses). This allows file names that contain newlines or other types of white space to be correctly interpreted by programs that process the find output. This option corresponds to the -0 option of xargs.

You can also do this with just du. Just to be on the safe side I'm using this version of du:

$ du --version
du (GNU coreutils) 8.5

The approach:

$ du -ah ..DIR.. | grep -v "/$" | sort -rh

Breakdown of approach

The command du -ah DIR will produce a list of all the files and directories in a given directory DIR. The -h will produce human readable sizes which I prefer. If you don't want them then drop that switch. I'm using the head -6 just to limit the amount of output!

$ du -ah ~/Downloads/ | head -6
4.4M    /home/saml/Downloads/kodak_W820_wireless_frame/W820_W1020_WirelessFrames_exUG_GLB_en.pdf
624K    /home/saml/Downloads/kodak_W820_wireless_frame/easyshare_w820.pdf
4.9M    /home/saml/Downloads/kodak_W820_wireless_frame/W820_W1020WirelessFrameExUG_GLB_en.pdf
9.8M    /home/saml/Downloads/kodak_W820_wireless_frame
8.0K    /home/saml/Downloads/bugs.xls
604K    /home/saml/Downloads/netgear_gs724t/GS7xxT_HIG_5Jan10.pdf

Easy enough to sort it smallest to biggest:

$ du -ah ~/Downloads/ | sort -h | head -6
0   /home/saml/Downloads/apps_archive/monitoring/nagios/nagios-check_sip-1.3/usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_ldaps
0   /home/saml/Downloads/data/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/logstash-2013.04.06/0/index/write.lock
0   /home/saml/Downloads/data/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/logstash-2013.04.06/0/translog/translog-1365292480753
0   /home/saml/Downloads/data/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/logstash-2013.04.06/1/index/write.lock
0   /home/saml/Downloads/data/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/logstash-2013.04.06/1/translog/translog-1365292480946
0   /home/saml/Downloads/data/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/logstash-2013.04.06/2/index/write.lock

Reverse it, biggest to smallest:

$ du -ah ~/Downloads/ | sort -rh | head -6
10G /home/saml/Downloads/
3.8G    /home/saml/Downloads/audible/audio_books
3.8G    /home/saml/Downloads/audible
2.3G    /home/saml/Downloads/apps_archive
1.5G    /home/saml/Downloads/digital_blasphemy/db1440ppng.zip
1.5G    /home/saml/Downloads/digital_blasphemy

Don't show me the directory, just the files:

$ du -ah ~/Downloads/ | grep -v "/$" | sort -rh | head -6 
3.8G    /home/saml/Downloads/audible/audio_books
3.8G    /home/saml/Downloads/audible
2.3G    /home/saml/Downloads/apps_archive
1.5G    /home/saml/Downloads/digital_blasphemy/db1440ppng.zip
1.5G    /home/saml/Downloads/digital_blasphemy
835M    /home/saml/Downloads/apps_archive/cad_cam_cae/salome/Salome-V6_5_0-LGPL-x86_64.run

If you want to exclude all directories from the output, you can use a trick with the presence of a dot character. This assumes that your directory names do not contain dots, and that the files you are looking for do. Then you can filter out the directories with grep -v '\s/[^.]*$':

$ du -ah ~/Downloads/ | grep -v '\s/[^.]*$' | sort -rh | head -2
1.5G    /home/saml/Downloads/digital_blasphemy/db1440ppng.zip
835M    /home/saml/Downloads/apps_archive/cad_cam_cae/salome/Salome-V6_5_0-LGPL-x86_64.run

If you just want the list of smallest to biggest, but the top 6 offending files you can reverse the sort switch, drop (-r), and use tail -6 instead of the head -6.

$ du -ah ~/Downloads/ | grep -v "/$" | sort -h | tail -6
835M    /home/saml/Downloads/apps_archive/cad_cam_cae/salome/Salome-V6_5_0-LGPL-x86_64.run
1.5G    /home/saml/Downloads/digital_blasphemy
1.5G    /home/saml/Downloads/digital_blasphemy/db1440ppng.zip
2.3G    /home/saml/Downloads/apps_archive
3.8G    /home/saml/Downloads/audible
3.8G    /home/saml/Downloads/audible/audio_books