Thank you for sharing. After reading I agree that changing existing features could break processes for users.
It would be easy to make mistakes when in a hurry and looking at the following output: $ df -h | grep /$ /dev/nvme0n1p1 12G 8.5G 3.6G 71% / $ df -H | grep /$ /dev/nvme0n1p1 13G 9.1G 3.8G 71% / I'm happy with the calculations done but as stated in the path set mentioned I would've preferred if the output was: $ df -h | grep /$ /dev/nvme0n1p1 12GiB 8.5GiB 3.6GiB 71% / $ df -H | grep /$ /dev/nvme0n1p1 13GB 9.1GB 3.8GB 71% / I propose that the options -h and -H not be changed, for compatibility, but that it becomes possible to make a distinction between the two formats outputs. Can we use the same options, but to trigger the longer annotation, we double the characters used to -hh and -HH? therefore $ df -hh | grep /$ /dev/nvme0n1p1 12GiB 8.5GiB 3.6GiB 71% / $ df -HH | grep /$ /dev/nvme0n1p1 13GB 9.1GB 3.8GB 71% / or for ls ls -lhh *.crt -rw-r--r--. 1 danie.dejager danie.dejager 2.6KB Sep 29 13:07 1.crt Regards, Danie On Fri, 1 Oct 2021 at 18:28, Glenn Golden <g...@zplane.com> wrote: > > A patchset submitted last year > > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2020-09/msg00001.html > > would partially address this (for df, du, and ls) by consistently enforcing > the semantics given in Section 2.3 of coreutils.info (8.32): If that patch > were adopted, units suffixed with "B" (e.g. kB, MB, GB, etc.) would always > imply base-2 units, and B-less suffixes (e.g. k, M, G) would always imply > base-10 units, with no exceptions. ("iB" suffixes would not be used.) > > However, the overall issue is more complicated than this, because those > semantics in Section 2.3 are directly contradicted by statements appearing > elsewhere in 8.32 coreutils.info that invert the 2.3 semantics. > > See the above posting (and follow-ups in that thread) for all the gory > details and historical background. > > NOTE: I do not know whether the program behavior and documentation > described > in the above post is still extant in coreutils release 9. > > Glenn Golden >
