sort human readable output from du

[secondmouse]

Hi all,
If I want to list and sort the current folder's content based on their sizes (big files first), I can use

du * | sort -nr

and the sizes are displayed in KB's. If I want the sizes to be displayed in human-readable format, I can use option -h for the du command, but the sort command will not work correctly. For example, a 8.0K file will be listed before a 4.0M file. Is there any way to sort and the output correctly for human-readable format?

[drl]

Hi.

If I were doing this, I'd probably do it in perl. The perl sort allows you to specify a comparison routine.

The utility at MSORT also allows the user to write a comparison routine (as it turns out, also in perl), and one then avoids all the supporting infrastructure of an entire perl script.

I think some versions of awk have a built-in sort operator, and then the conversion of items like "17K" and "33.8M" could be done in awk.

Let us know what you finally do ... cheers, drl

[secondmouse]

Thanks drl. I got the answer from
du question: sort by size & show human-readable sizes - Ubuntu Forums

du -k * | sort -nr | cut -f2 | xargs -d '\n' du -sh

Also folks are talking about adding human readable sorting support to command sort in
GNU Coreutils feature request: sort by human-readable disk sizes - Justinsomnia

It would be nice if we can use sort -h to sort output from du -h *