Re: Support in sort for human-readable numbers

[Matthew Woehlke]

Vitali Lovich wrote:
> Perhaps - but for sort, at least from my thinking of how I would
> implement this, the additional logic (at least to behave correctly on
> all inputs) would be somewhat complicated.  Can you please explain why
> you believe this belongs in sort and wouldn't be better served by
> pre-processing the text before sort & post-processing it after as
> necessary?

I'd like to point out that, if you're going to require that, you've 
defeated the purpose of sort understanding human-readable numbers in the 
first place. If I have to write something more convoluted than 'du -sh * 
| sort -h', I might as well write 'sdu -s *'. (Which, in fact, I did. 
'sdu' is a script that expects normal everything-in-bytes output, does a 
plain old 'sort -n' on it, and then uses awk to make the sizes 
human-readable.)

IOW, if you make people format the output anyway, you might as well just 
forget -h and make the post-formatting be what converts from raw integer 
sizes to human-friendly sizes. At least, that's my $0.02.

--
Matthew
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--
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