linux - How can I sort du -h output by size

Saturday, September 19, 2015

I need to get a list of human readable du output.

However, du does not have a "sort by size" option, and piping to sort doesn't work with the human readable flag.

For example, running:

du | sort -n -r

Outputs a sorted disk usage by size (descending):

du |sort -n -r
65108   .
61508   ./dir3
2056    ./dir4
1032    ./dir1

508     ./dir2

However, running it with the human readable flag, does not sort properly:

du -h | sort -n -r

508K    ./dir2
64M     .
61M     ./dir3

2.1M    ./dir4
1.1M    ./dir1

Does anyone know of a way to sort du -h by size?

Answer

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)

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