lmerz1 / sizeof

A single command to get the size of a file or directory, with readable, formatted output

sizeof

A single command to determine the size of a file or directory, with user-friendly, uniform output.

Usages

sizeof path/to/file-or-dir
si path/to/file-or-dir
sof path/to/file-or-dir

These aliases can of course be adapted to your liking.

Example outputs

$ si some-file
86 kB
$ si ..
264 MB
$ si $HOME/Pictures
2,9 GB

Notably, using si without arguments will default to calculating the size of the current directory.

Also, I haven't bothered to test, but the decimal character from the last example is probably locale-dependent (whatever your implementation of the internally used du does is used)

How to get

Add sizeof.sh to your path (e.g. export PATH="$HOME/scripts:$PATH" as an executable, and an alias like the following

# sizeof lies in $HOME/scripts
alias si="sizeof.sh"
alias sof="sizeof.sh"
alias sizeof="sizeof.sh"

into your .{ba,z}shrc* file.

*May work for more shells, but this has not been tested. In particular, the currently used function keyword is not POSIX-compliant.

Options

You can set the "unit" to be multiples of 1000 or 1024 (Kilo/Mega/Giga/etc. vs. Kibi/Mebi/Gibi/etc.) by changing the value of the code's first variable ("default") or passing an optional argument.

$ si some-dir
264 MB  # uses default of 1000
$ si some-dir 1024
252 MiB

Abbreviated values for decimal/binary bases follow the symbols used here: kB, MB, GB, …; KiB, MiB, GiB, …