How to list largest files on volume in size order?

You can have a Finder window that sorts by size. You can do a Find command by size. You cannot SORT a Find results window by size. If you think that is absolutely ridiculous, tell Apple so:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html/

This used to work fine in Tiger, but aside from spending some $$ to get a Spotlight or Finder replacement there is no solution that I have seen in Leopard. Apple actually reduced the functionality of Spotlight. You can't sort by other things that people are interested in either, such as date modified or date created. The Finder can, but a search results can't be set to such a completely normal state. It could in Tiger. Tell Apple.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

1. Open a new finder window.
2. Click on the volume you want to explore (e.g., "Macintosh HD").
3. Click in the search box and type at least one character to initiate a search (you can then delete the character immediately).
4. Next to "Search:" click on the volume you selected earlier.
5. Next to the "Save" button at the right, press the plus icon.
6. Click the drop down menu "Kind" and choose "Other."
7. After a few seconds, a whole slew of search parameters will appear. Check the box at the far right to enable "Size" as a search option.
8. Press "OK" and you should be all set!

I hope this helps. 🙂

How to display size column in Finder

It's simple: open up Finder, change to list view and press ctrl-j (or select "View options" from the View menu), in the new window tick the little box next to "Size". Voilà.

floba

Message was edited by: floba

One thing you can do, although it isn't the greatest work around, is to go ahead and do Find by size of some large value, for instance Size is greater than 100MBs. When you get the list of files, select the first one then hit Command-Option-i to bring up the Inspector panel. This shows the size of the selected item. Use the arrow key to move down the list, the Inspector window will change automatically as you move down the list, and you can make a note of the size of candidates for deletion. Thus, if I do the search for items larger than 100MBs I get a couple of data base caches, several movies, some dmg installers, a few aif files, and something called "PCMWave"--which turns out to be a file for the "Alex" voice. The inspector shows the Google earth cache file to be 221MBs and the "Alex" resource to be 670MBs (!!!). If I weren't using Google earth nor the Speech function, or at least don't care to hear Alex's life-like speech, those would be a good candidates for deletion, and would give me nearly a GB or extra space.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

You are right. I'm sorry, just tried my hint in an ordinary (and no search) Finder window. In fact I am quite astonished to learn that there's no option to add the Size column to the search list view... Would have been useful.

floba