du -h | sort ?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

I want to sort a directory by file size, du -k |sort -nr is fine, but the output number is NOT friendly.
So how to sort more friendly with du -h ?

2

The problem with -h is that you end up with things like K, M and G for kB, MB, or GB (I think, I have no access to Linux right now to actually verify this). So you are better off using -k if you want to sort it.

3

I have an approach
du -k |sort -nr > sort_file.txt.

The output file will be like this:
3783749 .
5294 ./dir3
4790 ./dir3/dir5/dir1
3088 ./dir8
...

can you help me on how to convert the number from sort_file.txt to MB, GB format, like this:

3.6 GB .
5.2 MB ./dir3
4.7 MB ./dir3/dir5/dir1
3 MB ./dir8
...

Thanks

4

You can use awk to format the size field :

du -k | sort -nr | awk '
     BEGIN {
        split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ",");
     }
     {
        u = 1;
        while ($1 >= 1024) {
           $1 = $1 / 1024;
           u += 1
        }
        $1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units);
        print $0;
     }
    ' > sort_file.txt

Jean-Pierre

1 Like
5

Thank Jean-Pierre,

your script with awk works, but the calculation is not correct.
My actual data like this:
126M /openoffice/bin
31M /openoffice/old_versions

but it report:
0.1 MB /openoffice/bin
0.0 MB /openoffice/old_versions

Could you please correct it!
Thank so much!

6

The awk script formats the result of the du -k command not du -h.

Jean-Pierre.

7

Oh, yes.
It's perfect! Jean