HN is so predictable that I knew someone would complain about this the second I read it, including ignoring the "by default" part so that they can by contrary.

> HN is so predictable that I knew someone would complain about this the second I read it

And I considered there'd be a pretty good chance that I'd get a reply like this.

Doesn't sound like a default case to me.

Seems obvious that you're responding to "when would you not want human-readable file sizes?" which was a question never asked.

So, yes, I concede that my posts weren't composed with exquisite clarity, and they aren't devoid of opportunity for misunderstanding. You win.

In a program that natively makes strong use of colour, though, here's an option: print exact file sizes, but in two related colours (say, bright yellow and dark yellow/brown), as follows: the first colour for the first 1, 2, or 3 digits, and the other for the remaining $n$ digits where $n$ is divisible by 3. That way the first colour will represent a whole number of KB, MB, GB, etc—and which of these it is will be very clear as it's easier to get that rough-count size—and the fainter/darker colour would give the full exact number of bytes. Best of both worlds!

  export TIME_STYLE=long-iso
  export BLOCK_SIZE="'1"

  $ ls -on i*
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 1001     1,335 2017-06-16 14:31 icon-shelters.svg
  -rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1,633,946 2016-11-07 14:50 insects.png
  -rw-r--r-- 1 1001 1,445,837 2016-11-18 10:32 ix

Time style: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Form...

The rendering of time in any format other than ISO-8601 is a pet peeve of mine. It always baffles me why people do it.

    alias ls=exa

  command ls

  \ls

If they are similar, then it's easy enough to tell that also. E.g. 1 GB vs 995 MB.

I disagree; what's easier, spotting the biggest and smallest of these at a glance:

        6,677,967
        5,916,109
        7,164,551
    3,745,059,597
            3,175
        4,194,304
        3,550,137

    6.37M
    5.64M
    6.83M
    3.49G
    3.10k
    4.00M
    3.39M

But then you run into the case that the "32GB" SD image that you just dd'd won't copy to another card of the same nominal size, because it turns out that the destination card has reduced capacity due to 100KB of bad sectors, or something. Or your file went from 2100 bytes to 2081 bytes because your editor dropped all the \r characters. Or a network transfer ended a bit prematurely, chopping off the end of a file.

I'd consider these to be reasonable cases where the byte-exact filesize might be more useful than the readability-friendly version of the number.

On the other hand, yeah, there are a lot of cases where I just need a general idea of the filesize. "-h" display is wonderful for that.

Human readable units helps quite a bit with this, and I think that makes it a sane default. As long as you can specify you want to see bytes, and the sorting is done on the actual byte value, there's little lost because the majority of the time it will help rather than hurt.

Like I've said in these comments, I'm constantly surprised by which settings people change and which ones they don't, so differing opinions on exa's defaults is nothing new. exa shares my opinion of wanting to see thousand separators and byte suffixes by default; ls, on the other hand, has no opinion because with file sizes that small, it didn't really have to choose what the output should be like.

People have said that in scripts you'd want to just output the file size in bytes, and they're right, otherwise the numbers won't sort correctly. If you're writing a script, though, you're going to be taking more care than if you were just wanted to list some files. I've lost count of the number of times I've listed a directory, given up trying to count the digits of the file sizes, then re-ran the command with `ls -h`, but I've never written a script without thinking about what the output should be like.

Actually, many of the utilities that output in human readable format do so in a way that's also sortable through sort's -h option. It might be worth making sure you have a mode that outputs the same way so people can easily utilize sort. That is, K/M/G instead of Ki,Mi, Gi. Unless sort ignores the second alpha character when using -h and it still works, then no problem. :)

Edit: Actually, I just tested, and at least as of the sort in coreutils 8.4, it recognizes both forms, and actually dies with a warning if you mix them, so you're all good!

    # echo -e "100Mi\n100Ki\n10Mi\n10Ki" | sort -h
    10Ki
    100Ki
    10Mi
    100Mi
    # echo -e "100Mi\n100Ki\n10Mi\n10K" | sort -h
    sort: both SI and IEC prefixes present on units

I think your perception of filesizes is slightly skewed; "nine or more digits" means roughly >=100MB. Disk images, software, and videos would be in that range, but probably not the average MP3 (100MB of 320k MP3 is over 40 minutes), and I don't think I've ever handled a "word processing document" more than a few dozen MB --- and even that would already be many hundreds of pages.

Of the files sitting on my desktop at the moment, which is not necessarily representative nor typical but covers a wide range of types (pdf, mp3, zip, exe, jpg, mp4, ...), slightly more than 10% are 10MB or more (8 digits), ~15% have 7 digits (1-9MB), and the rest are below 1MB (<= 6 digits).

Seven digits isn't quite as bad, but without thousands separators it's bad enough.

Even then, most of my documents are quite a bit smaller, as I have a tendency to write my documents in wordpad instead of office, and then save as rtf or txt.

I'm not sure why I said nine, seven is what I was thinking of.

How does 524404648 vs 5.24404648e8 look?

I would prefer to choose the base unit and see the decimals myself. Then I can quickly ascertain the difference.

Ah, but does "this tool" (whichever tool) mean GB or GiB when it says "GB"? As the prefixes get larger, the difference between powers-of-ten and powers-of-two prefixes gets significant.

Seriously, "du -h | sort -h" is a regular command for me.

At least I learned that ls had a -h option. I don't know why I should use it on files but I routinely do df -h to check the size of file systems. That's a place where it is useful.