Recursively Listing Files in Size Order using find-name-dired

For a while now I have been looking for a simple method in emacs for trimming down my largest files, usually this means locating those large image files and compressing them as I like keeping my media compressed or deleting any large files I didn’t know were lurking around my system.

The obvious choice for this is find-name-dired but for me always had the annoying habit of reordering the final result after finishing the recursive search. Even if I set the find-ls-option correctly (not necessarily an easy task) to sort by size the final dired buffer output would always keep resetting to sort by file name.

It took me a while delving into the nuts and bolts of find-name-dired but I finally realised that after processing using the find-ls-option a function find-dired-refine-function is called which by default is set to find-dired-sort-by-filename which:

Sorts entries in Find buffer by file name lexicographically.

Why this does this I have no idea (perhaps it is because the output of the find command ends up in a dired buffer which would always generally make sense to sort by name?), but as I will only ever want to use find-name-dired to list files in size order and then to prune any or compress them using standard dired commands then I can just do the following:

(setq find-dired-refine-function 'nil)
(setq find-ls-option (cons "-exec ls -lSh {} +" "-lSh"))

Which will honour the intended find-ls-option to do exactly what it says on the tin and that is to:

-l : long list as =dired= will always need this form of listing
-S : Sort by file size
-h : Show size in human readable form, which  doesn't seem to affect the sorting

For me this seems to be a more transparent method and of course I guess other standard ls options can now be passed through to dired, for example for files in order of time, you would pass -t