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List Files in Human Readable Format

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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!

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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!