Bash Notes

NOTE: most of this is likely to be relevant to other shells as well, but it is only tested or intended for Bash use.

Find largest files when there is insufficient disk space

A little caveat of some coreutils like sort is that they may write to a temp file behind the scenes to do their work. Normally this would be fine, but if you have a system that has run out of disk space, it can make it difficult to find large files taking up space. To find the largest files you can use the du command, then sort its output before using head to limit the number of results:

sudo du -ka / | sort -n -r -S 10000000 | head -n 100