du -h, sorted

[bellaire]

A humble offering, hoping to find a place where its perlishness won't be scorned. On another site, I got a little obsessed with this question I came across: How can I get sorted, human-readable output from du? It doesn't have a sort option, so you have to pass it to another program, like sort:

du | sort -nr

But if you want human-readable output, you can't do that, because sort can't sort it numerically. Others were offering shell solutions that invoked du on each item twice, once before being passed through sort, and once after for the human-readable verison. Wasteful! After finding solution in Awk, I wrote this "one-liner":

du -B1 | sort -nr | perl -e '@h=qw(b K M G);for(<>){($s,@f)=split/\s+/
+;$e=3;$e-- while(1024**$e>$s);$v=($s/(1024**$e));printf "%-8s%s\n",sp
+rintf($v>=100?"%d%s":"%.1f%s",$v,$h[$e]),@f;}'

But then I realized it'd probably be better to use Perl for the sorting, and got this shorter result:

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)}<>;'

Both of them return human-readable disk usage output, sorted largest item first:

4.4M    .
3.6M    ./colors
372K    ./plugin
128K    ./autoload
100K    ./syntax
100K    ./doc

I almost posted this to the 'Obfuscation' area, but I thought this would be more appropriate. I am prepared to do penance if I was mistaken.

Update: Thanks to hbm, grinder, and Roy Johnson, a significantly smaller version has been golfed (putting it here because it's buried around ^7 in the comments):

perl -e'%h=map{/.\s/;99**(ord$&&7)-$`,$_}`du -h`;die@h{sort%h}'