Question

I’ve written a simple shell script that finds large files, mostly to save myself some typing. The work is being done with:

find $dir -type f -size +"$size"M -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -rn

I’d like to turn the byte output into a human readable format. I found ways online on how to manually do this, e.g.,

find $dir -type f -size +"$size"M -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -rn |
   awk '{ hum[1024**4]="TB"; hum[1024**3]="GB"; hum[1024**2]="MB"; hum[1024]="KB"; hum[0]="B";
      for (x=1024**4; x>=1024; x/=1024){
         if ($1>=x) { printf "%7.2f %s\t%s\n",$1/x,hum[x],$2;break }
      }}'

But this seems messy. I was wondering: is there was a standard way to convert bytes into a human-readable form?

Of course, any alternate methods of producing the below output, given a directory and min-size as input, are also welcome:

   1.25 GB      /foo/barf
 598.80 MB      /foo/bar/bazf
 500.58 MB      /bar/bazf
 421.70 MB      /bar/baz/bamf
 ...

Note: This must work on both 2.4 and 2.6, and the output should be sorted.

Answer 1

find ... | sort -rn | cut -d\  -f2 | xargs df -h

for instance 🙂 or

find $dir -type -f size +$size -print0 | xargs -0 ls -1hsS

(with a little inspiration borrowed from olibre).