Can I use stat to show human readable size of file?

Question

I'm trying to use stat command to display a list of files in the current directory, sorted by largest to smallest. my script is

filelist=$(ls -p | grep -v/)
filesize=$(stat -c "%s : %n" $filelist | sort -nr)

It works however it displays the size in bytes. Is there a way to show it in a human readable format using stat? or do i have to try something else. thank you for the help.

Answer 1

As far as I know, the stat program cannot display human readable sizes by itself. But you can always pipe it to another program that does it, such as numfmt:

stat -c %s /path/to/file | numfmt --to=iec

Applied to your example, it would be:

filelist=$(ls -p | grep -v/)
filesize=$(
    stat -c "%s %n" $filelist | sort -nr -k1 | while read filesize filename; do
        printf '%s : %s\n' "$(numfmt --to=iec <<< $filesize)" "$filename"
    done
)

Please note I added the -k1 option when calling sort because I assume you want to sort using the size, not the name.

numfmt has the advantage that you can choose how to want to display the human readable size. I suggested --to=iec because this is the most common for file sizes, but you may want to use other conversions. Please refer to the numfmt man page.

As a last note, I would advise you against storing files directly out of the $() capture because it will not work when a filename contains a space character. You could use find to list the files and get the size at the same time, e.g.:

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -not -type d -printf '%s %f\n' |
    sort -nr -k1 |
    while read filesize filename
do
    printf '%s : %s\n' "$(numfmt --to=iec <<< $filesize)" "$filename"
done