On Mon, 27 Jan 2020 10:05:41 +1100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 11:59:33AM -0500, David Goerger wrote:
> > This diff teaches du(1) the -m flag, report disk usage in megabytes.
> > This brings us in line with implementations in the other BSDs, Linux,
> > and Illumos.
>
> Why is it needed? -k is required by POSIX, adding arguments for
> megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes etc seems silly when
> there is already 512 byte blocks, kilobytes and -h output.
It is useful in conjunction with sort. For example, I often do:
du -sk * | sort -rn | head
to see the largest disk users.
However, output in kilobytes is less useful than it used to be due
to larger files now being common. Using the BLOCKSIZE env var is
more flexible but is cumbersome to use and not portable.
- todd
