I agree with Anonymous Monk in post Re^2: sort file with your own logic that the best is to start by normalizing the values. This can easily be done in a Schwartzian Transform: 
use strict;
use warnings;

my %scale = (K => 1024, M => 1024**2, G => 1024 ** 3);
print map {$_->[1]}
      sort {$a->[0] <=> $b->[0]}
      map {/^(\d+)(\w)/; [$1 * $scale{$2}, $_];} <DATA>;

__DATA__
33G     /data/A
37M     /data/B
44G     /data/C
46G     /data/D
68G     /data/E
114G    /data/F
148G    /data/G
169M    /data/H
17K     /data/I

[download]
This produces the following output: 
$ perl sort_du.pl
17K     /data/I
37M     /data/B
169M    /data/H
33G     /data/A
44G     /data/C
46G     /data/D
68G     /data/E
114G    /data/F
148G    /data/G

[download]
Note that I have used powers-of-two for K, M and G unit prefixes, it is easy enough to change them to powers of 10 if one wants to comply with newer standards (it is even easier, because you can use a regex to add groups of three 0's), but I strongly suspect that the du utility still computes data volumes in power-of-two units.

Also note that I am not using the Schwartzian Transform for performance reasons, but only because I think it is very efficient "code-wise", just two instructions and 4 lines of actual code to solve the problem.

Je suis Charlie.

In reply to Re: sort file with your own logic by Laurent_R
in thread sort file with your own logic by citi2015

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