Subject: bug#12312: Feature Request: du -h or du --si sort by human readable value

From: kat amsterdam <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:39:07 +0200

Hi GNU core utility developers:

First of all thank you very much for developing the software that we have
come to rely on. It's well appreciated!

I have a feature request based on a question that was asked on askubuntu.com

the question is: why does du -h  not sort by the human readable value.

Example:

1) du returns random sort order
*du -h /home/user/Photos*

156M /home/user/Photos/cats
124M /home/user/Photos/vacation
1G   /home//user/Photos/family
148K  /home/user/Photos/profile

2) du returns sorted by number but not by acutal value in this example G is
large than M and M is larger than K
*du -h /home/user/Photos | sort -n *

1G   /home//user/Photos/family
124M /home/user/Photos/vacation
148K  /home/user/Photos/profile
156M /home/user/Photos/cats

3) this works partially but is very difficult to remember

du -k * | sort -nr | cut -f2 | xargs -d '\n' du -sh | head -n 10

4) This is even more ridiculous, computers are supposed to do the work for
us, not make attempt impossible memorization tasks.

alias duf='du -sk * | sort -n | perl -ne '\''($s,$f)=split(m{\t});for
(qw(K M G)) {if($s<1024) {printf("%.1f",$s);print "$_\t$f";
last};$s=$s/1024}'\'

Please add a sorting function to du -h and du --si to sort the human
readable values to make your wonderful utility even more useful.

This is program one time, and it's done for everyone. The entire GNU and
linux communities will be beter for this time saving feature.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet,
Damiön la Bagh
Amsterdam, Nederland
==
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