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What commands do I need for Linux's ls to show the file size in MB?

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2 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

ls -l --block-size=M will give you a long format listing (needed to actually see the file size) and round file sizes up to the nearest MiB.

If you want MB (10^6 bytes) rather than MiB (2^20 bytes) units, use --block-size=MB instead.

If you don't want the M suffix attached to the file size, you can use something like --block-size=1M. Thanks @StephaneChazelas for suggesting this.

This is described in the man page for ls; man ls and search for SIZE. It allows for units other than MB/MiB as well, and from the looks of it (I didn't try that) arbitrary block sizes as well (so you could see the file size as number of 412-byte blocks, if you want to).

Note that the --block-size parameter is a GNU extension on top of the Open Group's ls, so this may not work if you don't have a GNU userland (which most Linux installations do). The ls from GNU coreutils 8.5 does support --block-size as described above. Thanks to @kojiro for pointing this out.

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A difference maybe worth noticing: --block-size=M cause a M suffix to be displayed next to the size, and you can use --block-size=1M to omit it. It may be worth mentioning as well that you need GNU ls for that (most non-embedded Linux systems will have GNU ls). – Stephane Chazelas Feb 8 at 12:59
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Would this be GNU ls? Standard ls has no such argument. With the xsi extension ls has the -s flag, which makes it report the number of blocks, but there is no standard flag --block-size. – kojiro Feb 8 at 13:15
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@kojiro GNU ls does have --block-size as of coreutils 8.5, which is what's installed on my Debian Squeeze system. Since the question was explicitly for Linux and did not specify anything else, I'll admit I assumed a userland centered around GNU coreutils. I have updated the answer to clarify this. (Besides, Open Group ls doesn't seem to have -h either. :)) – Michael Kjörling Feb 8 at 13:34
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@EmanuelBerg, 1000^7 (10^21) is greater than 2^64 (which is ~10^19.27) – Stephane Chazelas Feb 10 at 10:17
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I guess we'll be moving to 128-bit architectures soon, so that --block-size=Z will work for ls. – Michael Kjörling Feb 10 at 12:38
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up vote 4 down vote

ls -lh human readable file sizes, long format

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That will print file sizes in GB for anything bigger than just under 1.0 GiB (I believe). – Michael Kjörling Feb 8 at 8:36
yeah, sorry, i thought that's what was wanted (as opposed to bytes). – Sirex Feb 8 at 8:48
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I must say I'm a little surprised that this has received two upvotes, considering that it doesn't answer the question. (Or rather, it only does so when file sizes are in the range 1 MiB - 1 GiB.) -h is a useful switch that I too use quite often, but it doesn't do what the OP is after. – Michael Kjörling Feb 8 at 10:35
@MichaelKjörling I don't see it as a bad answer (although I didn't upvote). Sometimes the OP doesn't word a question exactly as they should so it was possible that they just wanted human readable output and instead phrased that as "in MB". – Dason Feb 8 at 14:33
@Dason I didn't downvote this, either, for precisely the reason you state as well as the fact that for most semi-large files, -h does meet the OP's stated requirement quite nicely. But I also didn't upvote, because as I said it doesn't really answer the question. As for "phrasing it wrong", well, the OP has been on SE (ServerFault, StackOverflow and SuperUser) at least since late 2009 - early 2010, so certainly can hardly be considered a newcomer to the site. – Michael Kjörling Feb 8 at 14:39

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