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0 pointsuserbinator8y ago0 comments

If two files are orders of magnitude different in size, it's easy to tell that just by the units. As opposing to counting the number of digits, which is tedious and error prone.

I disagree; what's easier, spotting the biggest and smallest of these at a glance:

        6,677,967
        5,916,109
        7,164,551
    3,745,059,597
            3,175
        4,194,304
        3,550,137

or these:

    6.37M
    5.64M
    6.83M
    3.49G
    3.10k
    4.00M
    3.39M

If they differ by orders of magnitude, then the difference is visually obvious when the full digits are printed out --- sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb. If they're compressed into units, you have to do some more mental multiplication and comparison.

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Houshalter8y ago

That only works when the files you want to compare are in the same folder and next to each other. If you just want to know how big a given file is, then you have to count the digits. And IIRC ls doesn't even print commas like that to make it human readable. It's just a blob of digits with more precision than is reasonably necessary for the vast majority of uses.

foobarian8y ago

For this reason when I list in -h mode I pretty much also need to sort by size (ls -lSrh).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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Houshalter8y ago

foobarian8y ago

For this reason when I list in -h mode I pretty much also need to sort by size (ls -lSrh).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse