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
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi – Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Google Extension Effect with CSS or jQuery or MooTools JavaScript

    Both of the two great browser vendors, Google and Mozilla, have Extensions pages that utilize simple but classy animation effects to enhance the page. One of the extensions used by Google is a basic margin-top animation to switch between two panes: a graphic pane...

  • By
    GitHub-Style Sliding Links

    GitHub seems to change a lot but not really change at all, if that makes any sense; the updates come often but are always fairly small. I spotted one of the most recent updates on the pull request page. Links to long branch...

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!