Re: sort ignoring human readable suffixes

[Paul Eggert]

Lucas Nussbaum <address@hidden> writes:

> Is there a reason why this is not implemented ?

Lack of time, basically.

> If not, I'll try to submit a patch adding a -h option, available
> only with -n.

Thanks.  Here are some thoughts.

Beware the decimal-point character: it's locale-dependent.

Handle both decimal and binary powers of 2, by looking for suffixes
like "GB" (decimal) versus "G" not immediately followed by "B"
(binary).

It's tempting to use strtod but I suspect it won't work in general
(due to the possibility of misconstruing an 'E' suffix, for exabytes)
and anyway it'd be faster to avoid floating-point, just as "sort -n"
does.

'h' should be attachable to each sort key, much as 'n' is.

Finally, will you support -gh as well as -nh?  It's probably not worth
the hassle but I thought I'd mention the issue.