Exa, a modern replacement for ls

Re:Exa, a modern replacement for ls by userbinator on Thursday August 03, 2017 @09:55PM (#14925755)

If two files are orders of magnitude different in size, it's easy to tell that just by the units. As opposing to counting the number of digits, which is tedious and error prone.

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

or these:

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

If they differ by orders of magnitude, then the difference is visually obvious when the full digits are printed out --- sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb. If they're compressed into units, you have to do some more mental multiplication and comparison.

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Re:Exa, a modern replacement for ls by Houshalter on Thursday August 03, 2017 @11:16PM (#14926076)

That only works when the files you want to compare are in the same folder and next to each other. If you just want to know how big a given file is, then you have to count the digits. And IIRC ls doesn't even print commas like that to make it human readable. It's just a blob of digits with more precision than is reasonably necessary for the vast majority of uses.

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Re:Exa, a modern replacement for ls by foobarian on Thursday August 03, 2017 @11:25PM (#14926105)

For this reason when I list in -h mode I pretty much also need to sort by size (ls -lSrh).

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