Linux Survival Basics

Find the Largest CI Logs

A CI job is slow or hard to inspect because some logs are unexpectedly large.

Command

find logs/ -type f -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -nr | head -10

What changed

Nothing changes. The command reports the largest log files.

Danger

safe

When to use it

Use when log uploads are slow or a job output is unusually noisy.

When not to use it

Do not use it for compressed logs when you need uncompressed size analysis.

Undo or recovery

No undo needed because this command is read-only.

Expected output

The 10 largest log files with byte counts.

demo script

Disposable terminal steps

find logs/ -type f -print
find logs/ -type f -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -nr | head -10

Terminal transcript Demo JSON

simulated output

What it looks like

disposable vessel

::fixture-ready::
$ find logs/ -type f -print
logs/unit.log
logs/integration.log
logs/build.log
logs/test.log
::exit-code::0
$ find logs/ -type f -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -nr | head -10
1200 logs/integration.log
130 logs/build.log
81 logs/test.log
6 logs/unit.log
::exit-code::0

YouTube Short

Find noisy CI logs.

Sort logs by size first. The biggest file is often where the pipeline is wasting your attention.

experiments

A/B tests to run

Metric: watch_time

A: Huge logs hide failures.

B: Huge logs slow your deploys.