slf - Show Large Files

Over time your brand-new disk gets fuller and fuller making you wonder Where is all my disk space at?. Meet slf which deeply scans a directory and shows the largest files or subdirectories in it. The tool supports Windows, Linux and macOS.

Usage examples

Show 6 largest files overall

$ slf -n 6 /
90.23 GiB /var/lib/libvirt/images/win10.qcow2
90.01 GiB /var/lib/libvirt/images/ubuntu20.04.qcow2
80.01 GiB /var/lib/libvirt/images/win7.qcow2
50.01 GiB /var/lib/libvirt/images/MX_Linux.qcow2

Show 5 largest directories in /usr

$ slf -d -n 5 /usr
15.94 GiB /usr/local
7.142 GiB /usr/lib
5.809 GiB /usr/share
1.535 GiB /usr/bin
499.8 MiB /usr/lib32

Download

The easiest way to download the latest version of slf is to use the bundled download.py which automatically detects your OS and places the according version of slf into the current directory.

git clone https://github.com/jopohl/slf
cd slf
python download.py
./slf    # Running without any argument will scan the current directory

To save some typing on Unix shells, use the following oneliner.

python -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jopohl/slf/master/download.py)"

Alternatively, manually download the latest version of slf for your OS with one of the links below.

• Linux
• Windows
• macOS

Why not simply use tool X, Y or Z?

My main motivation for this project was to implement something in Go. Therefore, I did not make an extensive study about existing tools. Nevertheless, slf is built with performance and concurrency in mind.

For example, listing the 20 largest files in /var with default Linux tools

sudo find /var -type f -printf "%s\t%p\n" | sort -n | tail -20

takes 5.585 seconds on my system^[1]. Compared to that

sudo slf -n 20 /var

takes only 1.071 seconds. Not too bad!

[1]: Intel i7-6700K, Samsung 970 Pro 1 TB NVMe M.2 SSD