Hello everyone. I am new to this forum and have never done scripting before (in any language). I am on Redhat 5.3. I wrote a script to locate all files over 1GB in a specific directory and it works greate if there actually happens to be a file over 1 GB. The problem is, if there isn't a file over 1GB then it just seems to report random files that aren't even in the directory I'm telling it to look it. Can someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Here's a copy of the script:
find /sxplive/db -size +1G -name livenxt* -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lSh > /sxplive/rd/tmp/dbfilesize.log
cat /sxplive/rd/tmp/dbfilesize.log | mail -s "Review SXPLIVE DB file sizes" support@domain.com

You don't have "livenxt*" in single quotes, and as such bash will glob the filename and expand the command line to contain everything that matches that pattern, using them as arguments to "find". Put the pattern into single quotes and then the * will end up inside find, rather than being expanded beforehand.

The problem here is that the ls command in the scond part of that script will not get any arguments if no file is found that is larger than 1GB. In that case the default behavior for ls is just to display the files in the current directory. Change the first line toand it should work as intended.
For more info have a look at

Thank you both for the quick response. I will test your recommendations this week and see if that corrects the issue.

On the first solution I got the same result I was getting before the change.

The second suggestion find /sxplive/db -size +1G -name "livenxt*" -exec ls ls -lSh "{}" \; > /sxplive/rd/tmp/dbfilesize.log resolved my issue.

Thank you!

TobiSGD's solution was righterer than mine, ignore my comments... a little typo, but looks mostly good...

find /sxplive/db -size +1G -name "livenxt*" -exec ls -lSh "{}" \; > /sxplive/rd/tmp/dbfilesize.log

Oops, I missed that, corrected.