Human readable output

[Christoph Biedl]

Manuel L?pez-Ib??ez wrote...

> I vote for this feature. In du and df commands, this is invoked with:
> -h, --human-readable
>      print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
> 
> --si  likewise, but use powers of 1000 not 1024
> 
> Currently, in rsync, -h is the short form of --help.

Please do not, I repeat, do not three terrible things the gnu folks did
for ls, df etc:

1. Continue the prefix confusion which is using k, M, ... for 1024,
   1024*1024 etc. Their meaning is defined to 1000, 1000*1000 ...
   If you really want to use the 2^(10*n) quantities, use the
   not-so-new-anymore non-ambiguous prefixes ki, Mi, Gi.
2. Show a bias against the SI system by dropping the short-hand notation
   -H (now --si) for it while not touching the confusing -h (which
   counts in powers of two).
3. Re-use parameter names. "du -H" greats me with
   | du: WARNING: use --si, not -H; the meaning of the -H option will soon
   | change to be the same as that of --dereference-args (-D)


    Christoph