As well as that excellent idea, you might also want to use 'find' for a
different view of the situation. If /tmp is on its own partition, try on
that. Something like:
find /tmp -size +5000k
for example will find and list any file in /tmp bigger than 5 megabytes.
The nice thing about find is that you can add other criteria, and execute
commands on the file set. You could (though perhaps you shouldn't in this
case until you've at least looked to see what kind of files they are) do
something like
find /tmp -size +5000k -exec mv {} ~/bigfiles/ \;
which would grab those large files and move them to 'bigfiles' if you wanted
to use that directory as a holding area. There's the caveat that if you
wanted to put them back exactly where you found them it might be fiddly, in
that find will have recursed through the /tmp directory hierarchy. But if you
want to, you can use -maxdepth to control how many levels of subdirectory
find will drill down into. Man find has the details.
HTH
Fergus
Thanks to Eddie and everyone !!