GNU Coreutils feature request: sort by human-readable disk sizes

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The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system. These are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every operating system.

This post is an elaboration on a feature request I recently sent to the GNU Coreutils mailing list.

I’ve been playing with backups a bit lately, and my favorite command line tool in that effort (other than rsync of course) has been du—usually known for its annoying recursive and verbose output—but which I just learned to tame with the --max-depth=1 option, e.g.

$ du -h --max-depth=1
4.0K    ./bin
52M     ./code
765M    ./Desktop
12K     ./mail
17M     ./music
124K    ./PDF
5.5G    ./photos
153M    ./public_html
652K    ./ufc
7.3G    .

Perfect! Helps me quickly home in on which directories to trim, and which aren’t worth the bother. The -h “print[s] sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)” but as the list of directories gets longer, it gets harder to differentiate the 153Ms from the 652Ks.

If I don’t use -h, I can pipe the du output through sort -n, but human-readable sizes are so nice. So I proposed to the coreutils group that sort be extended with an option for sorting by human-readable disk size values. Using the example above, the hypothetical usage and output would look like this:

$ du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -h
4.0K    ./bin
12K     ./mail
124K    ./PDF
652K    ./ufc
17M     ./music
52M     ./code
153M    ./public_html
765M    ./Desktop
5.5G    ./photos
7.3G    .

Perhaps it’s time to refresh my knowledge of C?

Monday, September 24, 2007 10:27pm
Tech

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9 comments

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jackson
9/25/07 6:31am

Agreed. In the mean time, I’ve been using KDirStat (http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/) to help clean up my disks.

corey
9/25/07 8:02am

try:

ruby -e 'puts `du --si -s #{ARGV.join(%q( ))}`.sort_by{|foo|foo=~/(\d+\.?\d*)(\w)/;[$2,1/$1.to_f]}'  FILEPATTERN

quoted up for bash to use in an alias:

alias dus='ruby -e "puts \`du --si -s #{ARGV.join(%q( ))}\`.sort_by{|foo|foo=~/(\d+\.?\d*)(\w)/;[\$2,1/\$1.to_f]}"'
corey
9/25/07 8:10am

whoa. your comment box hates code.

http://pastie.caboo.se/100617

Try that.

corey
9/25/07 8:16am

Also, I noticed you used -h instead of --si

--si gives you lowercase k, which makes the size prefixes alpha sortable to actual size.

justin
9/25/07 11:08am

Corey, the command line force is strong in you. I was going for simple. :) And somehow getting the GNU folks to update sort.c seemed simpler than a ruby command line alias. Good news is, my email seems to have gotten some traction.

zen
2/29/08 2:07pm

I’ve been wanting sort to do this for ages. It can sort “dictionary”, “numeric”, and by “month name”, but not by “human readable”? :) Today I finally wrote a simple sort script in perl to handle the output of “du -h”.

fyi… your “hypothetical output” of “sort -h” isn’t quite right. ;)

justin
2/29/08 8:43pm

zen, how embarrassing! this has been on the web for 5 months and nobody noticed my mistake until now. thanks for the heads up, it’s fixed now.

simpz
5/22/08 4:19pm

Did this make it to a future release plan. Haven’t seen any objections expressed.

Steve
6/6/08 9:19pm

I’ve wanted this feature for ages. In fact, a few versions ago (coreutils 5.18 or so maybe) I had found a patch to add the switch, but it broke on a more recent update. I wonder what held it up?