tl;dr: $ find . -type f -ls | sort -r -k 7 | head -20

I’m a programmer who grew up on Windows, so while I’m competent at Unix commands, there’s a lot I don’t know. That “young and clueless with lots of time” period is a great time to pick up skills; the “busy working father” period means I have to be much more selective now.

Backstory: I have been a Dropbox user since they were in beta in 2006, and every once in a while I bump up against my free space limit and have to weed out files. This gets harder every time since everything left is something I’d previously decided to keep. COMPUTERS TO THE RESUCE!

I went to the first place I always look for these problems: Stack Overflow. There was an answer, of course, but it didn’t work for me. I tried to get it to work, but didn’t feel like looking past the man page for why the printf option wasn’t valid on my machine.

So the next place I looked was the rest of the Google search results. Eventually I came up with this:

$ find . -type f -ls | sort -r -k 7 | head -20

List all the files, sort in reverse order based on the 7th field, and take the top 20. Thanks nerds of the world for answering my question!