On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 12:19 PM Pádraig Brady <p...@draigbrady.com> wrote: > > On 01/10/2021 14:28, Danie de Jager wrote: > > Hi, > > > > The output from df -h and df -H is always G or M. Depending on who sends me > > usage stats I have to ask how the command was run to make sure I calculate > > usage correctly. Systems like Amazon EC2 use the explicit GiB suffix. > > Making it easier to know what sizes you are looking at. > > > > Can a future release of df not be improved to print out the GB or GiB? > > So you're suggesting that `df -h` changes to using IEC suffixes like Gi, Ti > etc. > and -H would use the current suffix format to indicate SI units. > That would be the right thing to do if we were adding these options now, > but at this stage I'm not sure it's worth it, because you wouldn't > be sure which version of df you were getting the output from. > > For completeness one can get unambiguous output using numfmt like: > > $ df -B1 | numfmt --field - --invalid=ignore --to=iec-i > Filesystem 1B-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on > devtmpfs 3.9Gi 0 3.9Gi 0% /dev
I'm pretty biased toward showing units correctly, no matter the ensuing compatibility arguments. The distillation of the compatibility argument is: changing this will be painful for scripts. While true, it's still worse to have the wrong units reported. Is the primary target audience for human-readable values humans? Or scripts? If it's really such a problem, introduce a computer/script friendly output format and only ever append to the output when introducing new values. -- Chris Murphy
