There's no reason to feel left out if you're on a Windows platform, and someone uses 'find'.

Abigail

I suppose you could use this too (if you had enough ports)....

find / -type f -print|xargs ls -l|sort -rnk5|head -10
[download]

cheers

tachyon

{grin}

dir /b /o:-s | u:head -10
[download]

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
Timing (and a little luck) are everything!

Yes, you could. I realized that, but didn't present it, because it's neither efficient memory wise (as you are processing all the file names at the same time), nor is it run-time efficient, as you are sorting all the file names, and that's Omega (N log N). The solution where you keep a sorted buffer takes linear time.

If you want to factor in the amount of files (let's say k) to be reported, the solution you present takes O (N log N + k), while my solution takes O (k N). If you replace the array with a heap, you can reduce that to O (k + N log k). The used memory in your solution is O (N), and O (k) in my solution.

All mentioned upperbounds are tight.

Abigail

With the exception of which, which has a better Perl equivalent called pwhich, you should try http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ as standalone alternative for cygwin.
Quote from description:

Here are some ports of common GNU utilities to native Win32. In this context, native means the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime (msvcrt.dll) and not an emulation layer like that provided by Cygwin tools.

But nevertheless you run into problems with find and echo as they have DOS equivalents commands with the same name, but limited functionality. If you have Novell, you will hit e.g. ls, depending on your path.

You might have luck with this pipeline
du -a | sort -nr | head -10
which would give the top 10 files recursively found below the directory this command is issued from. The cross-platform GNU utilities would list the top-ten files.