A standard tool to convert a byte-count into human KiB MiB etc; like du, ls1

Question

Is there a standard tool which converts an integer count of Bytes into a human-readable count of the largest possible unit-size, while keeping the numeric value between 1.00 and 1023.99 ?

I have my own bash/awk script, but I am looking for a standard tool, which is found on many/most distros... something more generally available, and ideally has simple command line args, and/or can accept piped input.

Here are some examples of the type of output I am looking for.

    1    Byt  
  173.00 KiB  
   46.57 MiB  
    1.84 GiB  
   29.23 GiB  
  265.72 GiB  
    1.63 TiB  

Here is the bytes-human script (used for the above output)

awk -v pfix="$1" -v sfix="$2" 'BEGIN { 
      split( "Byt KiB MiB GiB TiB PiB", unit )
      uix = uct = length( unit )
      for( i=1; i<=uct; i++ ) val[i] = (2**(10*(i-1)))-1
   }{ if( int($1) == 0 ) uix = 1; else while( $1 < val[uix]+1 ) uix--
      num = $1 / (val[uix]+1)
      if( uix==1 ) n = "%5d   "; else n = "%8.2f"
      printf( "%s"n" %s%s\n", pfix, num, unit[uix], sfix ) 
   }'

Update  Here is a modified version of Gilles' script, as described in a comment to his answer ..(modified to suit my preferred look).

awk 'function human(x) {
         s=" B   KiB MiB GiB TiB EiB PiB YiB ZiB"
         while (x>=1024 && length(s)>1) 
               {x/=1024; s=substr(s,5)}
         s=substr(s,1,4)
         xf=(s==" B  ")?"%5d   ":"%8.2f"
         return sprintf( xf"%s\n", x, s)
      }
      {gsub(/^[0-9]+/, human($1)); print}'

Answer 1

No, there is no such standard tool. Not even a GNU tool, though many GNU tools can produce this format and recent versions of GNU sort can sort numbers with units.

I find your code a bit convoluted. Here's a cleaner awk version (the output format isn't exactly identical):

awk '
    function human(x) {
        s="kMGTEPYZ";
        while (x>=1000 && length(s)>1)
            {x/=1024; s=substr(s,2)}
        return int(x+0.5) substr(s,1,1)
    }
    {gsub(/^[0-9]+/, human($1)); print}'

(Reposted from a more specialized question)

Answer 2

As of Feb 2013 coreutils includes numfmt:

numfmt reads numbers in various representations and reformats them as requested. The most common usage is converting numbers to/from human representation (e.g. ‘4G’ ==> ‘4,000,000,000’).

E.g. :

echo 5607598768908 | numfmt --to=iec-i

outputs:

5.2Ti

Various other examples (including filtering, input/output processing etc) are presented HERE.

Answer 3

AFAIK there is no such standard tool to which you can pass text and it returns a human readable form. You may be able to find a package to accomplish the said task for your distro.

However, I do not understand why you may need such a tool. Most packages that give a related output, usually have a -h or equivalent switch for human-readable output.

Answer 4

There are a couple of perl modules on CPAN: Format::Human::Bytes and Number::Bytes::Human, the latter one being a bit more complete:

$ echo 100 1000 100000 100000000 |
  perl -M'Number::Bytes::Human format_bytes' -pe 's/\d{3,}/format_bytes($&)/ge'
100 1000 98K 96M

$ echo 100 1000 100000 100000000 |
  perl -M'Number::Bytes::Human format_bytes' -pe 's/\d{3,}/
   format_bytes($&,bs=>1000, round_style => 'round', precision => 2)/ge'
100 1.00k 100k 100M

And the reverse:

echo 100 1.00k 100K 100M 1Z |
  perl -M'Number::Bytes::Human parse_bytes' -pe '
    s/[\d.]+[kKMGTPEZY]/parse_bytes($&)/ge'
100 1024 102400 104857600 1.18059162071741e+21