Find the largest objects in git history

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A repo feels heavy and du on the working tree shows nothing. The weight is in history — a committed binary, a stray dump, a vendored archive. This lists the 20 biggest blobs across all commits, including deleted ones.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# git-fat — list the 20 largest objects in git history, human-readable.
set -euo pipefail

git rev-list --objects --all |
 git cat-file --batch-check='%(objecttype) %(objectname) %(objectsize) %(rest)' |
 awk '$1 == "blob" { print $3, $4 }' |
 sort -rn |
 head -20 |
 numfmt --to=iec --field=1 |
 column -t

Output is size path, biggest first:

Git on buildx.sh

Find the largest objects in git history