Finding the Largest File in a Given Directory

This script accepts several arguments from the user and operates on each of them through a for loop.

The $* denotes all the arguments that are sent to the script. The loop iterates through each argument sequentially and assigns it to i.

Within the loop, the [ -d $i ] condition verifies whether the argument i is a directory.

If it is a directory, the program outputs a message saying it is looking for the biggest file. It then executes ls -l $1 to display files in long format within the first argument, which is the first directory provided by the user. The output is piped through grep "^-", which returns only regular files and not directories. The tr -s ' ' command compresses several spaces into one space for the sake of uniform formatting. The cut -d' ' -f5,8 command pulls out the file size and file name from the output. If the argument is not a directory, the program outputs that it is not a directory.

The loop runs until all arguments are verified.

#!/bin/bash
for i in $*
do
        if [ -d $i ];
        then
                echo "large file size is"
                echo `ls -l $1 | grep "^-" | tr -s ' ' |cut -d' ' -f5,8`
        else
                echo "not directory"
        fi
done