If you are just looking for the largest files in a directory hierarchy, try this: find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -s | sort -n If your find/xargs don't

If you are just looking for the largest files in a directory hierarchy, try this: find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -s | sort -n If your find/xargs don't support null delimiters, then the guy who wrote musl has some tricks: http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html