du -s * 2>/dev/null | sort -n | cut -f2 | xargs du -sh 2>/dev/null

—snip—

* du.c (main): New options –human-readable (-h) and –megabytes (-m).
(human_readable): New function.
From Larry McVoy (——@sgi.com).

Ever since this patch was included in fileutils, system administrators have been frustrated by finding that while they could `du -h` they could not then `sort -h` the output. -h is not posix but is now solidly a part of the gnu coreutils du and ls commands. Including a switch for sort that respects the switch for du was not my invention. It has been argued a number of times on the developers mailing list. Mine was simply the straw which broke the camels back. The additional switch is consistent with the other tools, and merely augments the purpose of sort without creating a differing utility to it.

Something of the functionality of `hu` may have been the appropriate fix in ‘96, but since the ‘96 -h switch is long set, adding a corresponding switch to sort seems only too appropriate. To `promote’ -h out of du, df and ls into a separate utility would break scripts of users that depend on it.

Let’s call it ‘hu’ for ‘human units’. Hypothetically, it would convert any whitespace-delimited numbers found on stdin to human-readable units when echoing to stdout. (Optional arguments could limit this conversion to just certain fields or to alternate unit systems.) Then the solution would be:

du -sb * | sort -n | hu

du -sk * | sort -n | while read size fname; do for unit in k M G T P E Z Y; do if [ $size -lt 1024 ]; then echo -e "${size}${unit}\t${fname}"; break; fi; size=$((size/1024)); done; done

# sorted du -hsc
function duhs() {
du -s $* | sort -n | cut -f 2- | while read a; do du -sh $a; done
}

I don’t.

I prefer not to pay an additional cost on every write, to speed up this far-less-frequent case.