Bug#563118: du cannot sort its output without help from other programs

[Juhapekka Tolvanen]

Package: coreutils
Version: 8.1-1
Severity: wishlist



I wanted to do this: Give sizes of each files and directories located
in $PWD in human-readable-format AND sort output according to sizes of
those files and directories. Formerly I did it like this:

du -s * | sort -n | awk '{print $2}' | xargs du -sh

But that breaks, if file name has space or linefeed. After reading
manuals I created this:

du -s * | sort -n | cut -f 2- | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -r0 -I "{}" du -sh "{}"

But it still breaks, if file name has linefeed.

I wanted to be sure that I get what what I want, whatever characters
file names have. Therefore I created this script:

http://iki.fi/juhtolv/hacks/sh/sortdu.sh.bz2

Some other guy created this kind of script:

http://inz.fi/sortdu2.txt

But it would be much easier, if du had some sorting functionalities.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'testing-proposed-updates'), (500, 
'proposed-updates'), (101, 'testing'), (99, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-trunk-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=fi_FI.utf8, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages coreutils depends on:
ii  libacl1                       2.2.49-1   Access control list shared library
ii  libattr1                      1:2.4.44-1 Extended attribute shared library
ii  libc6                         2.10.2-2   GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libselinux1                   2.0.89-4   SELinux runtime shared libraries

coreutils recommends no packages.

coreutils suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

-- 
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen * http colon slash slash iki dot fi slash juhtolv
"Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur."