Biggest

A utility for finding the largest directories and/or files in a given directory hierarchy. Biggest supports pretty printed and colorized output to the terminal:

All pretty printing and ANSI color codes are printed to STDERR, while the actual file paths are printed to STDOUT. Therefore, suppressing STDERR output will only print the file paths with no ANSI escape sequences, pretty printing, or file sizes, which can be used for scripting:

Installation

Simply run

$ pip3 install biggest

Output

Unlike similar utilities, Biggest will only return a directory if the sum of the sizes of its immediate files minus the sizes of any files included in the Biggest output make it large enough to be included. That’s a complicated, self-referential definition, so here’s an example:

• Say the directory /tmp/ looks like this:

/tmp/
├── [25 MB] a.zip
├── [15 MB] b.zip
└── /tmp/foo
    ├── [20 MB] c.zip
    └── [10 MB] d.zip

• Running biggest /tmp/ -n 3 will yield a.zip, c.zip, and b.zip. The directory /tmp/foo did not make the cut because its file b.zip was large enough to be included, and therefore its 20 megabytes were not included in the size of /tmp/foo
• Now lets say a new file e.zip that is 50 megabytes is added to /tmp. Now biggest /tmp/ -n 3 will return e.zip, /tmp/foo, and a.zip. /tmp/foo was included this time because none of its files were large enough to make the cut, and therefore its size was interpreted as 30 megabytes.

Why does Biggest use this algorithm? Since a directory is always at least as large as its largest file, then, if Biggest didn’t use this algorithm, it would always return the directories containing the largest files!

Biggest uses a very efficient (and perhaps optimal) implementation of this algorithm. The worst case runtime is roughly O(𝑛 log 𝑚), where 𝑛 is the -n argument passed to Biggest and 𝑚 is the number of files and directories being analyzed, but validating that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Options

• -f ignore directories and only find the largest files
• -h prints file sizes with human-readable unit suffixes like "MB" and "GB"

Requirements

• Python 3.6 or newer
• Colorama

License

Biggest is licensed and distributed under the AGPLv3 license. Contact us if you’re looking for an exception to the terms.