Get largest file

snipplet:
directory, recursive, find, crawl
LastUpdate:
2013-03-23
Contributor:
Dan Douglas
type:
snipplet

One basic pattern for recursive directory traversal with operations on files at each node. This gets the largest file in each subdirectory. Toggling some small details will make it return the smallest, or traverse breadth-first instead of depth-first. 

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# GNU find + bash4 / ksh93v / zsh
# Get the largest file matching pattern in the given directories recursively
${ZSH_VERSION+false} || emulate ksh
${BASH_VERSION+shopt -s lastpipe extglob}
 
function getLargest {
    typeset -A cur top || return
    typeset dir x
	for dir in "$2"/*/; do
		[[ -d $dir ]] || return 0
		getLargest "$1" "${dir%/}" || return
		top[size]=-1
		find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "$1" -printf '%s\0%f\0' | {
			while :; do
				for x in cur\[{size,name}\]; do
					IFS= read -rd '' "$x" || break 2
				done
				if (( cur[size] > top[size] )); then
					top[size]=${cur[size]} top[name]=${cur[name]}
				fi
			done
			printf '%q\n' "${dir}${top[name]}"
		}
    done
}
 
# main pattern dir [ dir ... ]
function main {
	if [[ -n $1 ]]; then
		typeset dir pattern=$1
		shift
		for dir; do
			[[ -d $dir ]] || return
			getLargest "$pattern" "$dir"
		done
	else
		return 1
	fi
}
 
main "$@"
 
# vim: set fenc=utf-8 ff=unix ft=sh :

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