We also found deleted files that were still locked by some process:

$ sudo lsof | grep deleted

@Ravi Sorry for replying here; the “reply link” is missing from your latest comment.

> “but the command giving an error, see below”

sorry again, remove the "*" from "xargs du -s *".
The fixed command is :

$ find $HOME -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | xargs du -s | sort -rn | awk '{system("ls -ld " $2) ; exit}'


@Gilles,

Thanks again, but the command giving an error, see below.

$ find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | xargs du -s * | sort -rn | awk '{system("ls -ld  "  $2)  ; exit}'

du: cannot access './VirtualBox': No such file or directory
du: cannot access 'VMs': No such file or directory
drwxr-xr-x 17 tecmint tecmint 184320 Nov 16 14:52 Downloads

Could you run the above command in your Linux setup, and share the output?

Sorry for the two mistakes.

First, if running as root, wildcard ("*") expansion includes “dot directories“, and current dir (".") would always be the biggest one since it includes all others.

And there was also a mistake in the awk statement.

So this should do the trick:

$ find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | xargs du -s * | sort -rn | awk ‘{system(“ls -ld ” $2) ; exit}’

@Gilles,

Thanks for the tip, but it didn’t work on my end. Here is the output of the command…

$ du -s * | sort -rn | awk '{system("ls  -ld $2") ; exit}'

drwxr-xr-x 33 tecmint tecmint 4096 Nov 16 10:46 .