List directories ordered by size (with human-readable output)

You know there is the du command to fetch the disk usage of a directory (“.” in this example). By default, output is sorted by directory name, not size:

Copydu -h --max-depth=1 .
40K  ./a
2.3G ./b
3.1M ./c
500M ./d
2.8G .

To see which directories take up the most (or least) space you can order them by size like this (the -h switch does the magic of understanding humanized size formats):

Copydu -h --max-depth=1 . | sort -h
40K  ./a
3.1M ./c
500M ./d
2.3G ./b
2.8G .

Note that you will need to wait for du to compute its whole output which then gets piped into sort.