Change "du -sk" to "du -sh", better for humans about the-art-of-command-line HOT 5 CLOSED

I prefer du -skc * | sort -n. Human-readable output is nice, but not really pipe-friendly.

Ideally we would have a “humanify” or “hs” command, allowing us to do du -sbc * | sort -n | hs. That’s actually rather easy to implement: alias hs='perl -pe "s;\d\K(\d{3})+\b;qw(k M G T P)[\$&=~y///c/3-1];e"' will do the trick (most of the time — I literally just whipped this in five minutes without caring for edge cases).

from the-art-of-command-line.

For sorting you can use -h as well: du -sh * | sort -h.

Current Ubuntu at least, not supported on my Mac though 😢

from the-art-of-command-line.

Ooh, thanks, I didn’t know about sort -h. It’s not in POSIX, so I imagine it’s a GNU extension.

from the-art-of-command-line.

Good to help! As said, there is always something to learn. These sort of write-ups are a great help for that, and fun to read! Thanks!

from the-art-of-command-line.

👍 Thanks @tombrus and all for the discussion. I think this is an improvement.

from the-art-of-command-line.