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
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Xbox Live Gamer API

    My sharpshooter status aside, I've always been surprised upset that Microsoft has never provided an API for the vast amount of information about users, the games they play, and statistics within the games. Namely, I'd like to publicly shame every n00b I've baptized with my...

  • By
    MooTools ContextMenu Plugin

    ContextMenu is a highly customizable, compact context menu script written with CSS, XHTML, and the MooTools JavaScript framework. ContextMenu allows you to offer stylish, functional context menus on your website. The XHTML Menu Use a list of menu items with one link per item. The...

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!