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Comment by slavik81 | Hacker News Reader

It takes careful inspection to notice the big folders when the units vary. A 25G folder is much larger than both a 43M folder and a 256K folder, but it's not obvious at a glance when you have a big list.

Human-readable units are nice, but without them it's easier to sort by size.

    du -s * | sort -n

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sort supports human values

    du -sh * | sort -h

Not here :( What version of sort are you running?

Probably a recent version of GNU sort. AFAIK "sort -h" dates at least as far back as the version shipped with Debian old-stable.

I'm on macOS 10.12.3, GNU coreutils 5.93, and sort doesn't support the "-h" flag.

You're using a version of coreutils from over a decade ago.

  coreutils-5.93.tar.bz2	2005-11-06 09:06

It can also be achieved with some Perl:

    du -h | perl -e 'sub h{%h=(K=>10,M=>20,G=>30);($n,$u)=shift=~/([0-9.]+)(\D)/; return $n*2**$h{$u}}print sort{h($b)<=>h($a)}<>;'

Source: http://serverfault.com/a/62422/76878

set BLOCKSIZE to some power of 1024 when running du

Not in Mac :/

That's BSD's sort, not GNU sort, isn't it?

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