Show human readable file size in du

Question

I'm using this command to determine which directory is eating my disk.

du -sk * | sort -n

How can I get human readable result form du for file sizes? I've checked man and all it have is -k flag which turns byte results to kilobyte results. I need results in gigabytes

For questions like this, you absolutely need to say which version of UNIX you're using (e.g. AIX 6.1, HP-UX 11i, Red Hat Linux, etc., etc.) — EightBitTony, Jul 01 '13 at 19:11

score 14 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

14

This may work:

du -hs * | sort -h

If your copy of du doesn't support the -h flag, then you can convert the numbers using awk.

du -ks * | awk '
function human(x) {
    s="kMGTEPYZ";
    while (x>=1000 && length(s)>1)
        {x/=1024; s=substr(s,2)}
    return int(x+0.5) substr(s,1,1)
}
{gsub(/^[0-9]+/, human($1)); print}'

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Community

1

answered Jul 01 '13 at 18:43

1

my `du` supports `-h`. works good but sort doesn't work as you expect now. 90G is smaller than 100K now! – Mohsen Jul 01 '13 at 19:08
Are you sure `sort -h` does not work? I use it all the time in combination with `du` – Bernhard Jul 01 '13 at 19:31
2

my sort doesn't have -h. I'm on OSX – Mohsen Jul 01 '13 at 20:53
1

I should have made a note about that. The `-h` flag isn't very portable. You can use the `awk` option and sort before humanizing the numbers. Or, take a look at this: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/4688/26112. – Jul 01 '13 at 20:55

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 01 '13 at 18:51

3

On a Linux machine [Debian based], I get this when opening the man page for du:

 -h, --human-readable
              print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

Thus: du -h should give you what you need. Else, also from man du:

   --si   like -h, but use powers of 1000 not 1024

   -k     like --block-size=1K

I really wonder where you found your information.

answered Jul 01 '13 at 18:51

erch

4,890
17
49
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Maybe the OP is using AIX, where du doesn't have a -h flag. Or HP-UX. – EightBitTony Jul 01 '13 at 19:11

Show human readable file size in du

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