4 ms·
While I appreciate the story, what's wrong with `ls -lh`?
by cheald 14y ago
While I appreciate the story, what's wrong with `ls -lh`?
- ghostfish 14y agoMy thoughts exactly. This is just complexity for complexity's sake. Useful as an exercise, but the -h flag already does this is an even more readable manner.
- bajsejohannes 14y agoThis works with sorting, and it's easier to pick big files out at a glance. I would use this as often as -h
- cheald 14y ago`ls -lhS` works just fine to sort with human-readable sizes, at least on Fedora.
- runejuhl 14y agoYou could also use 'ls -lh | sort -h'.
- sliverstorm 14y agoI believe that's only supported in newer versions of sort.
- pepve 14y agoI guess people can be very different in this respect. I really need the full number (or at least all of the numbers in the same unit) to be displayed. I don't find the 'human' format helpful at all when looking at ls output.
- sliverstorm 14y agoIt just depends what info you desire. I typically use "ls -lh" to quickly find large files to clean up to recover disk space.
- tsahyt 14y agoI use "du <directory> -h -d 1|sort -h" for this because large files may be nested in directories and ls doesn't display the size of content directories (as far as I know). The output is sorted. Note that the "-d" flag for "du" doesn't work with all versions, but there were similar flags on all systems.
- sliverstorm 14y agoI don't usually have access to a version of "sort" that supports the "-h" flag.
- paddyoloughlin 14y agoFor me, -h makes it more difficult to quickly compare the sizes of files in one list by glance. This is something that I have to do often enough that it has prevented me from adding -h to my ls alias. I'd have to use it for a bit to be sure, but the post's suggestion seems a pretty good 'best of both worlds' solution to me.
- dredmorbius 14y agoThis. I run into the situation more often with 'du' (when trying to find which subdirectory tree has excess junk in it), to the point that, while 'du -h' is human readable, it's not particularly sortable so: du -hs $( du -s * | sort -k1nr,1 -k2 | head ) .... which will return the human-readable output, based on numerically sorting the full numeric output. Eyeball comparisons are easier as you're aware that results are already sorted by size.
- pwg 14y agoA reasonably recent sort from GNU coreutils has a -h (and equivalent long option --human-numeric-sort) which properly sorts the output of du -h, meaning you can do: du -h | sort -h And get properly size-sorted output.
- dredmorbius 14y agoTIL! Thanks.