The du command is a nice tool for telling you the disk usage of your files:

$ du *
[...]
1928	system.log
136	system.log.0.bz2
112	system.log.1.bz2
0	uucp
552	vnetlib
[...]

I find that adding the -h flag (which produces more human-readable output) is often very helpful for me:

$ du -h *
[...]
964K	system.log
 68K	system.log.0.bz2
 56K	system.log.1.bz2
  0B	uucp
276K	vnetlib
[...]

Now if I could just sort that…

$ du -h * | sort -n
[...]
  0B	./uucp
3.0M	./com.apple.launchd
4.0K	./eventmonitor
4.0K	./performance
5.9M	./asl
[...]

As you can see, this doesn’t work so well on OS X (as of 10.8.5). What can be done?

• If you’re on Linux you probably have a recent version of the sort program, specifically v7.5 or later, which has its own -h flag:

  $ du -h * | sort -h
  [...]
  76K     lightdm
  380K    apache2
  1.1M    installer
  1.4M    auth.log
  1.5M    cricket
  [...]
  

• If you’re stuck with something older, you can use a little utility like duhsort:

  $ du -hs * | duhsort
  [...]
  704K	tests/pr
  928K	ChangeLog
  1012K	tests/misc
  1.1M	old
  1.5M	doc
  [...]
  

  duhsort was really created to be used in shell functions and aliases. For example:

  $ duh() { du -h "$@" | duhsort; }
  $ duh | tail -5
  3.1M	./gnulib-tests
  3.2M	./tests
  5.9M	./lib
   25M	./po
   50M	.
  
  $ duh old doc
  244K	old/sh-utils
  328K	old/textutils
  548K	old/fileutils
  1.1M	old
  1.5M	doc
  
  $ duh -s old doc
  1.1M	old
  1.5M	doc