I know this is a perl site, but I think it's important to use the best tool for the job. For this, I think I'd skip using perl (gasp) and just do "find ~/ -size +1024k" This will give you all the files over 1MB. If you get too many results just bump it up to 2048, or 4096, whatever. It's how i find large files. You might also do a du -hs * from your home directory. It'll tell you which directory structures are using the most amount of space. This is helpfull when your problem is lots of little files (like a buildup of temp files) instead of a few large files.