sort -h friendly output mode

[wookietreiber]

As someone who writes command line apps and likes pipes, I would like to have a sort -h friendly output, as in:

$ my-rust-app
5.5G    foo
2.6G    bar
16G     baz

$ my-rust-app | sort -hk1
2.6G    bar
5.5G    foo
16G     baz

This should work with both SI and IEC.

[robjtede]

Lets get the requirements for this exactly. What does sort -h require?

• no spaces between value and unit
• IEC (binary) units. i.e.: G == GiB
• shorter units, G/M instead of GiB/MiB
• no units for <1KiB

that sound right ?

[wookietreiber]

Lets get the requirements for this exactly. What does sort -h require?

AFAIK sort doesn't care about SI/IEC (as long as it's consistent the comparison should be the same independent of SI/IEC) and it needs to be a word without spaces, so 1M not 1 M nor 1 MiB, dunno if 1MiB would work 🤷 (that's probably something for https://github.com/uutils/coreutils project).

[robjtede]

this lowercase "k" in this snippet from uutils/coreutils seems to indicate that SI is expected

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/9542e1504532afcdf546533bf931ad12514b1adf/src/uu/sort/src/sort.rs#L536-L540