GNU sort’s -h option

I only recently became aware of
GNU sort’s -h option, which strikes me as a beautiful encapsulation of
everything (both good and bad) that people attribute to GNU programs and
their profusion of options.

GNU sort’s -h is like -n (sort numerically) except that it sorts
numerically for GNU’s ’humane’ numbers, as produced by (for example) GNU
du’s -h option. This leads naturally to a variant of a little script
that I’ve already talked about :

du -h | sort -hr | less

On the one hand, -h is clearly useful in both commands. Humane numbers
are a lot easier to read and grasp than plain numbers, and now GNU sort
will order them correctly for you. On the other hand you can see the
need for a -h argument to sort as evidence of an intrinsic problem
with du -h ; in this view, GNU is piling hack on top of hack. The
arguable Unix way might be a general hum command that humanized all
numbers (or specific columns of numbers if you wanted) ; that would make
the example into ’du | sort -nr | hum | less’, which creates a
general tool at the price of making people add an extra command to their
pipelines.

I don’t have any particular view on whether GNU sort’s -h option is
Unixly wrong or not. I do think that it’s (seductively) convenient, and
now that I’ve become aware of it it’s probably going to work its way
into various things I do.

(This could spark a great debate on what the true Unix way is, but I’m
not going to touch that one right now.)

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