List Files in Human Readable Format

By  on  

I maintain an older computer with a small hard drive.  I use it mostly for storing MP3s, videos, and other types of basic media.  Unfortunately I often get warnings that disk space is low and so I need to delete files I no longer need; i.e. music or movies I have probably grown tired of.  I always sort them by size, largest first, so I can find out where the cogs are.

The problem is I try to stick to command line but only know how to do that sorting with human readable format by using Mac's Finder utility.  I recent found a command which will output the contents of the current directory and its subdirectories by human readable size:

du -sk -- * | sort -n | perl -pe '@SI=qw(K M G T P); s:^(\d+?)((\d\d\d)*)\s:$1." ".$SI[((length $2)/3)]."\t":e'

That command is kinda gross so you'll probably want to save it as an alias.  Nonetheless I now know how to get the desired information from command line!

Recent Features

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Digg-Style Dynamic Share Widget Using MooTools

    I've always seen Digg as a very progressive website. Digg uses experimental, ajaxified methods for comments and mission-critical functions. One nice touch Digg has added to their website is their hover share widget. Here's how to implement that functionality on your site...

  • By
    CSS Counters

    Counters.  They were a staple of the Geocities / early web scene that many of us "older" developers grew up with;  a feature then, the butt of web jokes now.  CSS has implemented its own type of counter, one more sane and straight-forward than the ole...

Discussion

  1. Han

    I use omnidisksweeper once in a while to get rid of junk

  2. Ayman Rady

    I don’t know if this is cross-platform or not, but on Ubuntu I use this

    # -h -- for human readable sizes
    du -sh ./* | sort -h
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!