get human friendly file size from shell in unix-like environments [portability]

Question

I'm using the following to get human friendly file sizes from the shell.

ls -hl /path/to/file | awk '{print $5}'

It works well in Mac OSX with bash. I'm not sure if its truly portable, or if there is a standard portable way to achieve the same result.

But for portability, you'll want to use a general purpose language that runs identically on multiple platforms. For example http://stackoverflow.com/a/512645/7552 — glenn jackman, Aug 31 '16 at 15:26
How portable are you looking for? POSIX? SUS? Embedded systems running busybox? — cxw, Aug 31 '16 at 15:26
If you do `stat -c %s /path/to/file` gets you the size in bytes. But not in human friendly mode. — JorgeO, Aug 31 '16 at 15:43
just posix, and human friendly is the goal, although i guess i can use stat and divide by 1024*N — Haleemur Ali, Aug 31 '16 at 15:48
`wc -c` will portably get you the file size in bytes, but you need to convert to kb, mb, etc yourself. — chepner, Aug 31 '16 at 16:52
This is effectively a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/q/27828585/816536 — Greg A. Woods, Sep 15 '16 at 05:34

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

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If you really want strict POSIX compatibility then you must do as is suggested in this answer to a very similar question, and do your own computation (e.g. in awk too) to calculate the desired "human-friendly" value.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

Community

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answered Sep 15 '16 at 05:39

Greg A. Woods

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kdhp · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-15T06:40:29.877

Most implementations of du(1) accept the -h flag, which causes it to print the disk usage of the file, or files, specified. The difference between disk usage and file size in normally innocuous, rounding up to the nearest file-system block.

The -h flag, though widely supported, is an extension. For maximum portability unit conversion would have to be done manually an pointed out by chepner.

*BSD, Illumos, BusyBox, and GNU CoreUtils all support the -h flag.

get human friendly file size from shell in unix-like environments [portability]

2 Answers2