Sorting disk usage by folder in Linux

Normally you would use something like this:

du -k | sort -nr > sorted.txt

But the output is not pretty since we don’t like counting bytes. This will sort it in human readable format:

du -k | sort -nr | awk '
     BEGIN {
        split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ",");
     }
     {
        u = 1;
        while ($1 >= 1024) {
           $1 = $1 / 1024;
           u += 1
        }
        $1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]);
        print $0;
     }
    ' > sorted.txt