sorting files by size in a dir

Question

how can I display the files in a unix directory sorted by their human readable size, going from largest to smallest?

I tried:

du -h | sort -V -k 1 

but it does not seem to work. thanks

Answer 1

ls(1) /sort:

-S     sort by file size

Answer 2

$ ls -lhS

---

-l     use a long listing format
-h     with -l, print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
-S     sort by file size

Answer 3

Unlike ls -S, this will properly handle sparse files:

ls -lsh | sort -n | sed 's/^[0-9 ]* //'

Answer 4

I got this to work for me:

ls -l | sort -g -k 5 -r

Which (I just figured-out) is the same as:

ls -lS

Answer 5

If you have the appropriate sort version you may simply use:

du -h | sort -rh

mine is

$ sort --version
sort (GNU coreutils) 8.12